Ever since the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China in December 2019, there have been more than 99 million registered cases across the world. It was only a matter of time before the 100-million mark was breached.
While there is a sense of encouragement with multiple vaccination drives taking place in different parts of the world, the damage and loss to human life caused during the pandemic is unprecedented. Take a look at some of these latest numbers. According to an AFP report, Indonesia passed more than 1 million cases on 26 January as the nation with a population of nearly 270 million launched one of the world's biggest vaccine drives. The US has suffered the highest death toll with 421,134 deaths, followed by Brazil (217,664) and India (153,587). Globally, the death toll stands at 2,140,687 so far.
Since the beginning of the outbreak, a number of online situation maps and dashboards, have been tracking the spread of the outbreak in real-time. This includes an overview of data from different countries based on a daily and weekly basis. Here’s a look at four such tools you can access to track the spread of the pandemic so far.
WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard
The World Health Organization’s covid-19 dashboard shows data from different countries in two forms: a choropleth map and a bubble map. Users can move around the interactive map to see the total number of cases (which appear in blue) and total deaths (appearing in orange). The dashboard also illustrates newly reported cases, deaths in the last 24 hours and 7 days on the map. Clicking on a country shows you the latest available data, both daily and weekly, from that particular region. Once you move from the ‘overview’ section, you can also see a ‘data table’ that has numbers from across the world in a tabular format. At the bottom of the ‘overview’ section, users can also see numbers from different WHO regions: Americas, Europe, South-East Asia, Eastern Mediterranean, Africa and Wester Pacific.
COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University
One of the earliest and most comprehensive dashboards is maintained by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. This interactive dashboard is available in both desktop and mobile versions, and was started in January 2020. It illustrates the location and number of confirmed covid-19 cases, deaths and recoveries for all affected countries. The interactive map can also be used to see metrics such as cumulative cases, active cases, incidence-rate and case-fatality ratio for different regions worldwide. Choosing a country from the dashboard’s list also gives you data from different cities.
COVID-19 Coronavirus Tracker - Kaiser Family Foundation
This covid-19 tracker maintained by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an American non-profit organization, uses data from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. Prior to this, data for the tracker was used from the WHO’s covid-19 situation reports. The tracker here features a compact design with four graphs on top, followed by a map that shows metrics on the number of cases and deaths globally. The dashboard also has an interesting section that shows the government actions taken in different countries to counter the pandemic. This information is shown in the form of a chart which superimposes coloured symbols on top of the number of new cases. These symbols represent actions like limiting public gatherings, closure of schools, and international travel restrictions, among other things.
Yale University COVID-19 Global Case Map
The covid-19 global case map created by the Yale COVID-19 Data Mapping Team is a simple yet useful dashboard that graphs the global accumulation of both cases and deaths over time in countries around the globe. The map display uses dots of different sizes at the center of geographical areas to show the corresponding number of cumulative cases currently reported. Their data collection and dashboard concept is courtesy of the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
