HSP compiled the following COVID-19 Statistics for Countries over 30 million Population or 500+ Cases. This data stands as of Tuesday, March 31, 2020.
Scroll down to download this excerpt from HSP’s database.
The chart is sorted by change in fatalities since yesterday. The fatality tide has shifted to the U.S. and will likely continue for the next 10-14 days, given our size and position in the virus spread. Italy, Spain and France are still turning in large deadly daily figures, but have started to taper, thankfully. Northwest Europe, Central Europe and nearby countries are still increasing their daily fatalities by 20-37%.
Belgium and the Netherlands are now #3 and #4 in terms of fatalities per million (After Italy and Spain), the most important metric in this list. They are followed closely by France and Switzerland. However, bear in mind that the Italian and Spanish fatalities per million are 3x Belgium, so the gap is massive. The U.S. is moving up the bad news rankings, but is still #16 in fatalities per million. IF we get to the Italian level of fatalities per million, it would be about 67,000 in the U.S. and 1.4 million worldwide.
The U.S. infection rate is only 1/3 of Italy (as of today; that will change). The Italian death rate of those infected is nearly 12%, about 6x the U.S. rate of just over 2% (which has increased the past two days). Based on these severe disparities, it is hard to see the U.S. hitting Italian death rates per million. If we did, it would still be 1/3 less than the number President Trump has been using the past 2 days. From a PR perspective, it’s better to set a low bar and hurdle it easily, so let’s hope his 100k number is the outside ‘bad’ number, even though it could go either way.
The worldwide fatality rate per infection is now nearly 5% (4.95%), which has continued to increase, but it has been heavily influenced by the Italian and Spanish figures, which are simply bad by any measure and hopefully outliers. Troublingly, but as predicted, more recent additions to the list with big populations in Africa are starting to hit very troubling fatality rates per infection, but this may be a factor related to lack of knowledge about those who are infected but not known (given the low avg. age in the developing world). The median fatality rate per infection is 2.3%. Iceland and Luxembourg, which have the highest infection rates per capita (again, a headline you don’t hear b/c they have very small populations), have very very low fatality rates per infection.
Germany, which has been the subject of endless media praise about its low infection and fatality rate, is now going more mainstream, as many expected it would. They have the 5th highest number of cases, the 10th highest number of cases per capita and now have a fatality rate over 1%, when they had been initially sitting under 0.5%.
Now let’s look at the next wave. We have countries totally 2.7 billion people with a 2-day infection growth rate from 30-75+%. These include India, Russia, Congo, Georgia, Turkey, Kenya, Brazil, Canada, Ukraine, U.S.. Other than the U.S., most of these still have just a few thousand cases or less, so we stand by for major growth.
As a recap, the countries on the list include those with populations over 30 million or with 500+ cases (we added Lithuania and Armenia today, who crossed over the minimum). The total infections has not passed 850,000 and fatalities has passed 42,000. The top 10 countries in fatalities comprise 39,000 of the 42,000. Italy and Spain represent 50% of the total death toll in the world from the virus. We expect the U.S. to double its fatalities every 2-3 days, sadly, for the next week or so, but then it should slow. Much depends on the big states of California, Texas and Florida…all places very much behind the testing curve.
