April 30, 2020

Coronavirus Growth in Western Countries: April 29 Update

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through April 29. In an obvious effort to make my life more difficult, the UK has suddenly decided to start reporting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. Why haven’t they been doing this all along? Beats me, but they’re doing it now which means the Johns Hopkins numbers showed a sudden, artificial spike on Wednesday. The UK health authority has a different data series that adds the new deaths over time instead of all in one day, and obviously that’s a better one to use. Unfortunately, it’s always a day behind, so the numbers in today’s chart for the UK only go through April 28. With any luck, the Johns Hopkins folks will catch up and start using the new series before long.

In any case, it doesn’t make a big difference to the shape of the chart. All the dots are a little bit higher than yesterday, but the peak still looks to have been around mid-April and the number of deaths has been slowly declining for more than a week.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here. The UK coronavirus dashboard is here.

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