This is to me one of the saddest and most important charts on the pandemic.
Those countries that are doing bad right now (high on the y-axis) are largely the same countries that did worst overall in this pandemic (cumulative case rate until Aug 1 on x-axis).
This is a slightly different version of the same chart.
Here the x-axis shows the cumulative case rate up to the present (which means some of the correlation is simply due to current cases counting towards cumulative cases).
And with the color showing the postive rate.
This chart would show us when a country reaches herd immunity.
A country that actually achieves herd immunity will have a high cumulative case rate and the current case rate will be low → it will end up in the bottom right corner (where no country is right now).
Some responded saying that Israel, Sweden, and South Africa are not in the chart and that these countries are close to herd immunity.
Now some believe that Singapore is close to herd …
No, they are not.
Singapore had an outbreak among migrant workers in May. They now have low cases with the help of excellent testing efforts. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_…
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The rise of confirmed cases in Europe is very rapid.
– This is showing the 7-day rolling average. Over the last week 138,500 cases were confirmed every day.
– The doubling time of confirmed cases for Europe as a whole is two weeks.
But as always, confirmed cases are only a fraction of total cases.
And testing has become worse in the last weeks – the positive rates have increased in many European countries – so that the true doubling rate is likely quite a bit faster.
1/n] The pandemic will end when we reach herd immunity. The question is how we get there.
In a world without science and technological innovation there would be no alternative: The only way to achieve immunity is for a large share of the population to get infected.
2] But that’s not the world we live in. We can achieve herd immunity via a vaccine.
3] So it's a question of how optimistic we are about medical innovation.
Being in favour of a high infection rate now makes sense if you are pessimisic about the world's chance to develop a vaccine or to make progress towards good antivirals.
The cumulative death rate – since the start at the pandemic – in European countries.
The 5 countries where most lives were lost are: Belgium, Spain, the UK, Italy, and Sweden.
The countries that did well – those at the bottom – suffered a death rate that was 10-times(!) lower.
And these are the current positive rates of testing. Those countries that did poorly in containing the pandemic were – and are – also doing poorly in testing.
Belgium, Spain, UK, Italy, and Sweden have high positive rates.
Especially Finland, Norway, and Denmark are doing well.
What will the global decline of economic growth mean for extreme poverty?
• Orange is the pre-COVID scenario.
• The rise of poverty shows us what to expect under a contraction in global growth this year of 8 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
This is very, very bad.
The global goal of ending extreme poverty globally was out of reach before the pandemic as I and many others have written last year.
Now with the global pandemic it is not realistic at all sadly.
(Reaching the 2030 would now require all countries to grow at rates of 8 percent per year between 2021 and 2030 and this we cannot realistically expect.)
1/n] I think it's a very good decision to give this year's Peace Nobel to the World Food Programme.
Hunger is one of the world's biggest problems and the WFP – one of the UN insitutions that works outstandingly well – is making the world a better place.