This is follow-up to my earlier posts where I began to track the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 daily situation reports.  I have updated the spreadsheet here through WHO’s Sunday evening report.

I have added tabs for the U.S., Germany, France and Spain, which are the countries with the most cases right now, excluding Italy.  I have also added columns on the “Table” tab with the daily percentage change in new cases and new deaths.

Here are the highlights from the most recent data:

• Europe has become the epicenter of the outbreak.  The number of new cases there (151,000) now far outstrips the total number of cases in China.  Italy is particularly alarming.  News cases there accelerated over the weekend and its mortality rate is the highest in the world at 9%.  Yesterday, Europe accounted for almost 70% of all new cases and nearly 90% of news fatalities globally.  How things play out in Europe of the next week are really going to be critical.
• While the global “calculated fatality rate” has been hovering just over 4%, there is a very significant variance between countries.  Italy is on the high end at 9% and Germany on the low end at .3%.  S. Korea’s new cases and deaths have slowed to a trickle at 1.2%.  It would obviously be very helpful if we determine why the outcomes between the different countries are so different.

‍

• It is somewhat stunning how quiet the outbreak is outside of Europe and the U.S.  Latin America, Africa and South Asia have remarkably few cases.  India, a country with a population of 1.3 billion, has fewer than 300 cases and only 4 deaths.
• I was taken aback by New York’s Cuomo’s prediction in his press conference over the weekend that 40-80% of New Yorkers would contract COVID-19.  I have seen some modeling with those kinds of numbers but have always understood those as worst-case scenarios.  So, I have added a column on each country’s individual worksheet that calculates the percentage of that country’s population that has been infected, at least according to WHO’s confirmed cases.  So far, no country has an infection rate over one-tenth of one percent (.1%).

1 Iam using the term “calculated fatality rate” to mean WHO’s total fatalitiesdivided by the total confirmed cases. There is widespread agreement that there are many more cases than thosethat have been confirmed because so many cases are presenting with no or mildsymptoms.  Therefore, the real fatalityrate is undoubtedly lower.

Spreadsheet Notes:

WHO releases their report late in the afternoon and itincludes reports from the previous day. So, for example, my current spreadsheet includes WHO’s report fromSunday evening, which is through Saturday. Most of the media and some websites are reporting number live from thevarious countries information directly and therefore will be more current thanthose in the spreadsheet.

As previously noted, the WHO daily situation reports have anumber of anomalies that make analyzing the data challenging.  Frequently, WHO’s number do not tie theirsummaries.  Also, there are somecountries (including U.S.) that the WHO does not report every day.  I have started “smoothing” the blank by doinga straight trajectory between the values on either side of the gap.  I have noted those with light orange shading. 

For global cases and deaths, I have added 7425 because WHOshows zero new cases and deaths for US due to the weekend issue notedabove.  I have highlighted these fieldsin yellow and will post actual WHO values for US with smoothing after 3/24report.

There was a change in how WHO reported Chinese new cases onFebruary 17.  I have created a new thatbackfilled the previous days’ reports as if the change had been in place duringthose days.

The spreadsheet currently has data broken down by country forChina, S. Korea, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland and theUS.  These are all the countries thatwere reporting more than 6,000 cases as of Sunday evening.

I found some input errors on the Germany and US spreadsheets.  Those have been corrected in this version.