Analysis by Keith Rankin.
This week’s first chart shows the incidence of new Covid19 cases in countries with more than 7,500,000 people. (Hong Kong is the smallest country to feature.)
It shows that, while very serious, the Australian outbreak is far from unique. The outbreak in Israel, for example, is much worse. Generally, countries with high recent case numbers (in blue) but low deaths (in gold) are countries with very recent outbreaks, as distinct from countries like the United States that have had persistently high Covid19 incidence. Others in this ‘recent’ category are Kazakhstan, Spain, Belgium, United Arab Emirates, Ghana, Venezuela, Czechia, Philippines, Uzbekistan, Hong Kong and Switzerland. So, some of the European countries badly affected in March are showing up with very recent outbreaks.
China (not in chart) has had an upsurge of new cases in the last couple of days. But Victoria – in Australia – has an incidence of new cases that’s 1,000 times higher than China. For large countries (ie over 7.5 million population), only Myanmar and Tanzania score lower than China for recent cases; and that’s probably because those two countries have done practically no testing. China has shown that it is possible for large countries to practically eliminate Covid19; good for its economy as well as for its health.
When sorting these high-population high-covid countries by deaths, it is Latin America, South Africa, and Iran and Iraq that show up. And the United States, which has a distinctly ‘third world’ look about it. The United Kingdom still shows up strongly, suggesting that its testing rates continue to be distinctly ‘third world’. Here we see Russia, and, for the first time in these charts, India. For the large low-testing countries – we may include Indonesia and Bangladesh here – it is the death statistics that tell the more complete story.
Australia and Sweden now look much the same as each other. Sweden, which has many more historical cases and deaths than Australia, continues to have cases and deaths at around the new alarming Australian level.
