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The human cost of coronavirus has continued to mount, with more than 94m cases confirmed globally and more than 2m people known to have died.
The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic in March and it has spread to more than 200 countries, with severe public health and economic consequences. This page provides an up-to-date visual narrative of the spread of Covid-19, so please check back regularly because we are refreshing it with new graphics and features as the story evolves.
LATEST UPDATES:
January 8, 2021: Added a live-updating chart tracking vaccinations administered by country
December 15, 2020: The primary data source for these charts is now the World Health Organization. Data for Hong Kong, Macau, Spain, Taiwan, and Turkey is now sourced from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. All additional exceptions and adjustments are listed in the complete list of sources on the interactive coronavirus trajectory tracker.
Europe’s average count of coronavirus-related deaths overtook Asia’s in early March. From mid-April, focus shifted to the US, where the number of deaths has remained consistently high, although the focus of the epidemic has shifted from the northeast to other regions of the country. Latin America became the epicentre of the pandemic in the summer of 2020, with the region accounting for almost a half of deaths each day. However, the surge in Europe since the autumn means Covid-19 remains a global pandemic.
With several vaccines approved for use, the race is now on for countries to vaccinate their populations:
How your country compares
This FT interactive tool allows you to explore data about the pandemic to better understand the disease’s spread and trajectory in countries around the world, and in US states.
There are concerns, however, that reported Covid-19 deaths are not capturing the true impact of coronavirus on mortality around the world. The FT has gathered and analysed data on excess mortality — the numbers of deaths over and above the historical average — across the globe, and has found that numbers of deaths in some countries are more than 50 per cent higher than usual. In many countries, these excess deaths exceed reported numbers of Covid-19 deaths by large margins.
There are several different ways of comparing excess deaths figures between countries. In absolute numbers, more people than would usually be expected have died in the in the US than in any of the other countries for which recent all-cause mortality data is available.
Adjusting for population size, the hardest hit countries are Peru and Ecuador, each of which have seen more than 1,000 excess deaths per million inhabitants. The two Latin American countries also have the highest excess percentage — excess deaths expressed as a share of normal deaths for the same period.
Exiting lockdowns
TRACKING GOVERNMENTS’ CHANGING CORONAVIRUS RESPONSES
From business closures to movement restrictions, some countries’ policies show first signs of easing. Follow the changes here using our interactive tool.
As Covid-19 spread beyond China, governments responded by implementing containment measures with varying degrees of restriction. Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government have compiled data on a range of government response measures, such as school and workplace closures and restrictions on travel and gatherings, to create a stringency index.
East Asian countries including South Korea and Vietnam were the first to follow China in implementing widespread containment measures, with much of Europe, North America and Africa taking much longer to bring in tough measures.
India’s sudden implementation of a strict 21-day lockdown propelled it to the top of the index, making it the first country reported to have hit the index’s upper limit of 100 for more than a single day.
Help the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford university improve the stringency index used in this map by providing direct feedback.
The death toll has now passed 100 in 47 European countries. The region currently accounts for 39 per cent of new daily cases, well down from the peak of more than 80 per cent in March.
Coronavirus has spread to all 50 states in the US. More than 23.7m cases and 387,013 deaths have been confirmed in the country.
SOURCES
Unless otherwise stated, national data on confirmed cases and deaths attributed to Covid-19 comes from the World Health Organization.
Data for the US, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands come from The Covid Tracking Project.
Data for the UK comes from the UK Government coronavirus dashboard.
Data for Hong Kong, Macau, Spain, Taiwan and Turkey comes from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Data for Sweden is calculated from the daily difference of cumulative figures that are published Tuesday through Fridays by the Swedish Public Health Agency.
The full excess mortality dataset used for this analysis is freely available for download on Github. It is compiled from data originally produced by official statistics agencies or civil registries in each of the jurisdictions mentioned. The full list of sources is also available on our Github repository.
Unless otherwise specified, vaccination data is compiled by Our World in Data. National sources are used for France, Germany, Portugal and the UK. Data for the US as well as its territories or associated states — American Samoa, Guam, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands — comes from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Help us improve these charts: Please email coronavirus-data@ft.com with feedback, requests or tips about additional sources of national or municipal all-cause mortality data. Thank you to the many readers who have already helped us with feedback and suggestions. We continue to incorporate your suggestions and data every day. We will respond to as many people as possible.
Reporting, data analysis and graphics by Steven Bernard, David Blood, John Burn-Murdoch, Oliver Elliott, Max Harlow, Joanna S Kao, William Rohde Madsen, Caroline Nevitt, Alan Smith, Martin Stabe, Cale Tilford and Aleksandra Wisniewska. Edited by Adrienne Klasa
Corrections: Due to a typographical error, the first paragraph of this story incorrectly stated the number of people who had died from Covid-19 for several hours on April 9. At the time, that figure should have read 87,741. Due to a typographical error, a map on this story temporarily showed an incorrect number of deaths from Covid-19 in Italy on May 14. At the time, that figure should have read 31,106.
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