Here’s a Dashboard That Compares How Countries Are Doing on COVID-19

Here’s another estimate of the evolution of R0. It’s from Simas Kucinskas, a finance professor in Berlin:

As always, I’ll warn that this is guesswork at best since it’s based on unreliable data. Still, it’s the only data we have, and perhaps a rough idea is better than nothing.

You can make a chart from your own collection of countries here. To the extent that this stuff is believable, I find Sweden the most interesting curve. They allegedly pushed their real-time value of R from 4 to 2 in the space of a single week. Impressive! On the downside, they haven’t pushed it very much farther down since then.

My expectation is that you’d normally see the value of R start high, and then there would be an inflection point when lockdowns and social distancing started taking effect. In these curves, you see that for Sweden and the US. But for the other three countries you don’t: there’s just a smooth downward slope. Why is that?

I can’t pretend to know how good these estimates are. But we’re all bored and everyone loves a dashboard that allows you to play around with different countries. So have fun, but don’t take any of it too seriously.

PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

payment methods

PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate