NEW on coronavirus: many western countries may soon face Italy’s situation
Case numbers since outbreaks began in several countries have tracked a ~33% daily rise. This is as true for UK, France, Germany as Italy; the latter is simply further down the path ft.com/content/a26fbf
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The exceptions are Asian city-states Hong Kong & Singapore, where spread has been relatively well contained through rapid & strict measures.
In Singapore, quarantined people’s locations are tracked, and breach of quarantine can mean a $10k fine or prison
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Meanwhile the jury is still out on Japan: is the flatter curve the positive result of measures like early school closures, or a misleading trend due to Japan’s very low testing rates? ft.com/content/dd4161
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I'm interested to know why there is no weighting for each country's population size, eg: US is 330m and Belgium is only 11.5m, as this must surely be an important factor in the potential for cases to increase
Also what is the reasoning behind the y-axis' (presumably log) scale?
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Not adjusting for country populations: twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/s
Log scale: twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/s
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Replying to @MedaBeda and @jaomahony
Sure, but normalized numbers aren’t especially helpful here. They’re good for tracking _relatively_ how much strain a country is under, but they’re bad at tracking the extent/state of the virus in a country, since that’s a simple absolute numbers game.
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Great graph – although for Korea, an outbreak bursted from Daegu, and not Seoul.
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I really wonder how many people will understand that this is a logarithmic scale, or what that means.
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That’s the beauty of it: it doesn’t matter at all. The information and message contained in the graphic all work without anyone needing to have even heard of a log scale before
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I’m no epidemiologist, but I am a #dataviz specialist, so here are some thoughts on coronavirus and log scales:
1) In the initial outbreak phase, a virus like this spreads exponentially not arithmetically, i.e a log scale is the natural way to track the spread twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/s…
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