Over the last two days, I’ve been assessing the coronavirus situation across the world. I’ve posted a regional analysis of trends in new cases on my professional site (an-out-of-control-pandemic-in-most-world-regions).

I reproduce a graph of regional trends below. The dramatic difference in trajectories for Western Europe and the Americas is obvious. While levels are lower in most developing regions, this is mostly due to much lower levels of testing. But confirmed new cases in all regions apart from Europe and East Asia and Pacific are rising.

North America has the most out-of-control epidemic, and that is all due to the USA. I plotted trends for blue and red states in the USA. There is a dramatic difference, with most of the recent rise in new cases occurring in red states (that voted for Republican presidents in most of the recent presidential elections). In the week ending July 5, there were an average 226 new cases per 1 million population in red states compared to 88 per million in blue states.

In a second post which-countries-are-succeeding-and-not-succeeding, I have shown country-specific plots for selected examples of three groups of countries: (1) those that are beating Covid-19, (2) those that are nearly there, and  (3) those that need to take action.  The experiences of the first two groups of countries show that (a) it is important to act early, not wait till there a hundreds of deaths in the country, (b) it only takes about 5-7 weeks of strong interventions to get rid of the majority of cases and (c) half measures don’t work.