There are all sorts of caveats that apply to these measures, including unreliable data from countries such as China and Iran (the former of which had been withholding data on asymptomatic cases) and constraints on the number of tests completed within the United States.

As recently as a few weeks ago, China made up the majority of recorded cases globally. Now, China’s reported cases make up only about 9 percent of global cases. China now reports fewer total cases than the state of New York alone. (The data below are through the end of Wednesday.)

As a percentage of the total, the number of cases in the United States now easily exceeds countries such as Iran and Italy, which were, for a period, seen as extreme examples of the spread of the virus.

At the end of Wednesday, the United States made up 22.9 percent of the global total of reported cases. On March 15, Americans represented 2 percent of the total.

There is not much good news in the pandemic, but one relative bit of good news is that the number of deaths in the United States is relatively lower than in other countries.

More than a quarter of the deaths reported globally have occurred in Italy, where deaths constitute nearly 12 percent of reported cases. In the United States, that figure is about 2 percent.

Again, this takes the Chinese and Iranian figures at face value. There are strong suggestions that both countries are underreporting their mortality figures, including satellite photos of mass graves in Iran and anecdotal reports about stacks of urns in the hardest-hit area of China.

It is also clear that the U.S. total probably does not include every death related to the coronavirus. Some jurisdictions have seen increases in pneumonia-related deaths which may be attributable to the disease caused by the virus, covid-19, but for which the deceased may not have been tested. That said, the number of deaths in the United States makes up about 10 percent of the global total, up from about 5 percent on March 26.