One useful way to look at the disease burden in a community is to look at the increasing case counts for different areas but normalize them to a common starting point. For this view, I selected the first time a location reached at least 100 cases to count as day one. This allows a reasonable comparison of the explosion of cases in a particular location.
First, look at a comparison of different countries. I’ve left China out of this analysis. Clearly, the worst disease burden outside the US has been in Germany, Italy, and Spain (red lines) closely followed by Iran and France (orange lines). Look at the US though (black line). We look to be on a far worse exponential grown curve than any other country. It’s also likely that this is very underrepresented of the true case totals because of the lack of extensive testing in the country.
One thing that can also be learned from this graph is that there are three countries (green lines) that have had a very good to exceptional response to COVID-19 (South Korea, Japan, and Singapore). We really should be looking to them as the leaders in how to contain this problem.
Next, look at the three countries outside of China that had the first local outbreaks and the three US states where case counts climbed first.. There’s only one thing I want to point out here that should be obvious looking at the graph. New York is in major trouble.
Comparing countries with thousand of square miles to something as densely populated as New York may not be an adequate comparison. I would like to see cities: New York to Tehran or Naples (that was hit pretty bad) would be better.
It’s New York State numbers, but I realize a population density number would be telling. Time is tight though with other things I’m working on for mitigation that are not public.