Source and method

The numbers in this article only show the confirmed cases of infected, deceased and recovered people. Different countries have different routines for if and when they test people and are likely to have a large number of unreported cases not only for the number of infected people but also for the recovered ones and in some cases deaths.

Currently in Sweden

The figures in this section that focus on Sweden are updated once a day, tuesday-friday when the Public Health Authority releases its daily report - around 14:00.

The number of new deaths in the last 30 days in Sweden shows the number of people who have died day by day. 50 new reported cases at the Public Health Agency on a given day does not mean that 50 people have died since yesterday - but that 50 new deaths have been reported - which may have occurred several days back in time. These bars are updated historically, just as the Public Health Agency does - and the deaths end up on the days where they actually occurred.

Due to the delay in the reporting from the regions, we have chosen to mark the last 10 days as uncertain. However, in some cases, data corrections can be made even further back in time.

Development of deaths over time: Here we report deaths due to corona day by day for the entire period. These bars also show the day when the death occurred. The trend line is a rolling average of seven days. For each day in the series, an average value is calculated of the deceased of the current day and the death of the next six days.

Development of reported deaths: This diagram shows the figure that the Swedish Public Health Agency reports every day and that most media report daily - how many new deaths have been reported to them in the last 24 hours. It does not place the deaths on the correct date, but thus shows how many new deaths have been reported on a given day (but most of them have occurred in previous days). There is a lag in reporting, especially during weekends - which means that the bars go up and down a lot.

Development of reported confirmed cases: The diagram shows the number of reported, confirmed cases of corona disease (covid-19). These numbers are mainly determined by how many people are tested for the virus. The more people that are tested - the more cases of disease can be detected and reported. At the Swedish Public Health Agency, you can read more about which and how many are tested.

The situation in the regions: There are two diagrams for each region. The top one shows the number of reported deaths per day in the region. The red line is a seven-day average. Above the chart you can see the total number of deaths in the region, the latest reported number and how many deaths have been reported in the last fourteen days.

The second graph on the regions shows the number of reported, confirmed cases of disease per day in the region. The red line is a seven-day average. Above the chart you can see the total number of reported, confirmed, disease cases in the region, the latest reported number and how many covid-19 cases have been reported in the last fourteen days.

We have chosen to use the Public Health Authority as a source for the Swedish part - because they report cases by region. But: The fact that we use two different sources in the article as a whole means that the figures in the Sweden part and the World part do not always match.

Development of deaths

The diagram showing the development of deaths has a y-axis showing the number and an x-axis over the number of days from the day of the tenth death. The Y scale is logarithmic. This means that the steps in the scale increase by a multiplication, 1, 10, 100, 1000 instead of, as on a linear scale, increasing at fixed intervals such as 1,2,3,4. We have chosen to show both a logarithmic scale on the number of dead and a linear on the proportion of dead, in order to give as much information as possible. If you look at the linear scale over the proportion of dead per country, for example, Italy's line at first continues almost straight up and it is difficult to read whether the rate at which people die has decreased or not. A logarithmic scale can highlight a change more clearly than a linear scale can. For example, by means of our logarithmic scale, we can see that Italy no longer has an exponential development (that deaths are doubled at a steady rate) but that their actions have had an effect. We therefore show a logarithmic scale so that we can more clearly detect changes in the rate of development and be able to compare them between the countries.

Source: Johns Hopkins CSSE

The state of the world

Figures for the worlds countries are updated once a day - when Johns Hopkins CSSE releases its daily file of data. That usually happens during the night Swedish time.

Different countries have different routines regarding both corona testing and how they report deceased due to the virus. It is important to keep that in mind before comparing the countries with each other.

Japan's figures are a compilation of reported cases from Japan and the cases of passengers on the Diamond Princess ship outside Japan.

We include the islands of Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin in France's results.

Population data from World bank and The World Factbook.