COVID-19: Is The UK Two Weeks Behind Italy? Nicoló Follow Mar 20 · 3 min read

As London slowly starts to lock down its streets, and the British people begin to truly realise the severity of the Novel Coronavirus outbreak beyond just stockpiling toilet paper; it is important to question whether this is enough and whether or not it might even be too late to avoid a complete meltdown of the NHS (National Health Service).

This week I had a bit of spare time and decided to delve a bit deeper into the numbers provided by Johns Hopkins University on the COVID-19 outbreak to see just how much better off the United Kingdom currently is when compared to Italy. The results startled me.

The following is a chart of the deaths due to Coronavirus in Italy and the UK every day, with total cumulative deaths in brackets.

As you can see by the above data and the following chart, Italy’s numbers just a couple of weeks ago look scarily similar to the past few days in the UK in terms of daily deaths due to COVID-19.

The chart shows the trajectory Italy followed over the same upcoming 2 weeks. It looks like a stretch right now, but it will be interesting to see whether the UK follows the same route as it has done so far or whether it will remain at a low level.

It is important to note that, although the numbers may be skewed because Italy has a considerably old population, Italy was almost fully under a self imposed quarantine at this time. Unless the UK takes some drastic measures, it may get significantly worse from here on out.

If you would like to see a similar chart for many other countries, check out the following Tableau page.

Disclaimer: I do not claim to be an expert in the field or a qualified epidemiologist. I’m just an amateur data scientist who decided to use some very basic maths and analyse the situation at hand. There are, of course, many factors that play into the death rate, and there are some who think we should be looking at infection rate instead. What’s clear is that we should all be taking precautions and be aware that things may be worse than they seem.

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