Creating a Common Timeline

Its hard to tell how we're doing on containing the virus without some basis of comparison.  Many countries are also dealing with the virus, but they all started dealing with it at different times.   In order to have a useful comparison, we need to put them all on the same timeline.

For my purposes, I chose the day each country crossed 100 cases and made that "day 1".  Before 100 cases, the tracking is sporadic and in several countries, all the early cases came from people who brought it in from another country.  100 cases seemed to me to be the place where all that early churn had settled out and you could make a good comparison, but please comment if you have other thoughts.  On that basis, the US is currently in day 16, Italy is in day 23, and Canada is only in day 5.

In my COVID spreadsheet,  I established each country's day 1 (some of countries aren't there yet) and built a new chart of case growth where you could compare the progress in all countries.

The following table can be found in the Common Timeline tab of the spreadsheet:

Starting Date	Country	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4
Mar 2 2020	USA	100	124	158	221
Jan 22, 2020	China			571	830
Feb 23, 2020	Italy	157	229	323	470
Feb 20, 2020	South Korea	111	205	436	602
Mar 2, 2020	Spain	120	165	228	282
Mar 1, 2020	Germany	130	165	203	262
Feb 29, 2020	France	100	130	191	212
Mar 5, 2020	UK	116	164	209	278
Mar 13, 2020	Canada	138	176	341	375
Mar 14,2020	Indonesia	117	134	172
Mar 15,2020	Philippines	142	187
	Vietnam
March 16, 2020	Thailand	114
March 9, 2020	Malaysia	117	129	129	129
March 2, 2020	Singapore	108	110	110	117
	South Africa
	Argentina
March 11, 2020	Australia	112	122	140	197
March 16,2020	Chile	155	156
	New Zealand

in the spreadsheet, the data goes out for 36 days.

Once we have that chart, we can render it in a graph of all countries to see how our case growth compares to each other (Go to Case Growth Timeline tab for Interactive view)



From the view of this graph, you can see China's growth was enormous compared to every other country -- but their population is also enormous, so that growth can be misleading, as we'll see in a future post.  The US Growth can be seen in the heavier blue line that ends on day 15 running just on top of the periwinkle line that ends on day 17 (France).

To get a better look, I removed some of the countries that were earlier in their progress as well as China, so their growth didn't distort the scale of the others.  That resulted in this chart:

Now some things pop out.  First of all,  Spain (green) seems headed towards an even worse situation than Germany (if anyone knows why, feel free to comment).  Also, Singapore barely has a curve at all.  South Korea, yellow, seems to be more successful at bending the curve than any of the other countries so far. On day 13, everyone else's curve spikes up while SK's curve is leveling out.  The US seems to be growing at a slower rate than our European peers except UK which is only in day 12, but is looking flatter.

My hope is that over the next couple weeks, we will see the US curve level out as well as the social distancing efforts have their effect.  While the picture above won't change, the chart itself will update daily around noon.  

One last note:  I'm doing my analysis from common data published on sites, but there could be information I don't know that is distorting the view.  For instance, it could be that the number of tests performed in the US is lower than other countries which could give the false impression of smaller case growth.  Other countries could have distortions in their records too.  I will deal with the testing question in an upcoming post, but I MAKE NO WARRANTY FOR ACCURACY HERE.  If you have questions or corrections, please share in comments and I'll do what I can.