How coronavirus spread across the globe - visualised
From early beginnings in China, the Covid-19 pandemic has spread rapidly across the globe
Since New Year’s Eve the world has lived through 100 days of Covid-19. There have been over 1.3m confirmed cases, and over 75,000 deaths. Billions of people are confined to their homes and stock markets have plummeted. Here is how the crisis unfolded.
Note: Data for the first 20 days is reconstructed from early WHO situation reports and the later progress of the disease. The case counts for the remaining days comes from the open source Johns Hopkins data repository.
What about the next 100 days?
There are some tentative indications that “the curve is flattening” in Italy and Spain, as the number of new cases each day falls. But the UK and the US have so far seemed to be about two weeks behind Italy in the progress of the disease, so their worst days may well be yet to come.
Similarly, although the Chinese city of Wuhan is gradually reopening after two months of lockdown, it is by no means clear when or how other countries will begin to return to normal.
In the meantime, scientists are working on several fronts to develop treatments and possibly vaccines; some of those trials may start to show results in the next month or so, but a viable vaccine could still be 18 months away.
Data caveats
The case counts come from data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, one of the most reliable sources. The figures reflect the available data at the time this article was first published. Occasionally there are differences in the case counts between the Johns Hopkins website dashboard and the open source data repository used here.
For the first 20 days, the evolution of cases is reconstructed from early WHO situation reports and the later progress of the disease. But the data should be treated with caution throughout as countries take different approaches to testing, and scientists believe many people may have been infected with the disease without suffering symptoms.
