For the past three months, I’ve been keeping track of when the number of worldwide infections hit each new half million infected (except for the first listed, of course). These are not exact times and numbers, but close enough to within the hour and within 500 deaths.
In March, it took roughly six days for each new 500,000 infections. Now in June, it’s taking less than three days. Depending on how you view it, the “good” (?) news is that most new infections are limited to four countries: the US, Russia, Brazil and India. The rest of the world pretty much has it under control, even hard hit countries like Ecuador. (China’s real numbers are anyone’s guess. The government’s tallies certainly can’t be believed.)
Please excuse the missed times and numbers on June 21 and 24, things were hectic on those days.
June 27 @ 18:00 UTC: 10,000,000 infected, 498,900 dead June 24 @ **:** UTC: 9,500,000 infected, 484,900 dead June 21 @ **:** UTC: 9,000,000 infected June 18 @ 18:00 UTC: 8,500,000 infected, 455,000 dead June 15 @ 12:00 UTC: 8,000,000 infected, 436,200 dead June 11 @ 15:00 UTC: 7,500,000 infected, 420,400 dead June 7 @ 14:00 UTC: 7,000,000 infected, 403,000 dead June 3 @ 17:00 UTC: 6,500,000 infected, 384,500 dead May 29 @ 22:00 UTC: 6,000,000 infected, 366,000 dead May 25 @ 04:30 UTC: 5,500,000 infected, 346,700 dead May 20 @ 10:00 UTC: 5,000,000 infected, 325,000 dead May 14 @ 21:00 UTC: 4,500,000 infected, 302,000 dead May 8 @ 21:00 UTC: 4,000,000 infected, 275,000 dead May 3 @ 11:00 UTC: 3,500,000 infected, 245,000 dead April 27 @ 08:00 UTC: 3,000,000 infected, 207,000 dead April 21 @ 16:00 UTC: 2,500,000 infected, 174,000 dead April 15 @ 09:00 UTC: 2,000.000 infected, 126,800 dead April 8 @ 20:30 UTC: 1,500,000 infected, 87,800 dead April 2 @ 18:00 UTC: 1,000,000 infected, 51,000 dead March 26 @ **:** UTC: 500,000 infected, 34,000 dead March 20 @ **:** UTC: 275,000 infected, 11,400 dead
Other good news: In the first month, the number of dead increased almost 50% each time. The numbers of new dead have decreased roughly every two weeks, from 40,000 in early May down to less than 15,000 in June for every 500,000 new infections. That tells you the hard work of nurses, doctors and other medical workers have paid off. Let’s just hope that effort hasn’t gone to waste.
As the Orange Twitler said, more testing produces more cases. In the early days test kits were in short supply and many marginal cases were turned away. And it wasn’t just testing, also “excess deaths” of people untested that didn’t get counted. Nowadays there are some drugs that can reduce the severity of some cases, further changing the death rates per infection. I suspect that data analysts will be kept busy for many years rearranging the numbers.
So is the “infected” number the
– number of new infections that time period? (not including the infected from the previous time period)
– the amount of people that time period that are currently sick/infectious? (but not including those that are dead/recovered, different tests measure different things)
– the total amount of people that have been infected (including dead/recovered)