This website is extremely important in keeping an eye of what is going on globally with Covid-19. It is a dashboard that shows the number of cases worldwide, the number of deaths and also has the facilities to show this in individual countries. It also shows through a bar chart daily increase in cases. This can be shown by pressing a tab towards the bottom right hand side labelled ‘Daily Increases’. If you do this you can see a number of patterns. Pattern one, unabated daily exponential increase and this can be seen in the US figures which is now heading towards 200,000. Exponential increase, with a doubling time of about 5 days, means that in the US if this trend continues there will be a one and a half million cases in about 20 days, unless the rate slows down due to the measures taken, which usually take two to three weeks. By clicking on each country on the left hand panel, you can see this rate in each country. Few countries are showing this exponential increase perhaps to a lesser extent, but this may also be a function of how late infection started in these countries. Perhaps the only other country showing this is Turkey.
The next pattern is that of either slower increase in cases or a levelling out of increase. This pattern is shown by UK, Iran and perhaps Canada.
The next pattern is that there is a slow decline of cases. The figures are not always neat, so that you may get a spike in the trend, but the important thing to look at is the overall trend over a period of 3-4 days and this is important because it shows that measures are working. Countries showing this pattern include, Germany, Austria, Belgium Italy and Spain (with the eye of faith) and other European countries.
The next pattern shows the efficiency of strict application of isolation measures, including quarantine of either whole towns, or of individuals with mild disease. This pattern is shown by China and South Korea.
So really we have models to work on and examples to follow and ways to monitor.