COVID-19: How does Ireland compare internationally?

Comparing the growth of a virus across different countries can be complicated. Different countries experience outbreaks at different times, they have varying population sizes and population densities, not to mention they are all using slightly different methods for determining what is included/excluded.

In the early days of an outbreak the virus is likely to spread exponentially and showing this on a standard linear y-axis makes it difficult to draw comparisons between countries. Using a log scale will provide a clearer picture of how quickly this is growing and also allows large established outbreaks to be shown alongside newly emerging outbreaks.

It’s also a good idea to align the start of the outbreak to the same point. For example, taking the time at which the country experienced 10 deaths and setting these as day 0.

This chart shows that both ROI & NI are on less agressive paths than the likes of Spain & Italy. But is that because we have relatively small populations? I’ll look at this later.

I mentioned that we use a log scale because it helps track the early exponential growth of a virus. But what happens when growth starts to slow?

When a country is no longer experiencing exponential growth and starts to see the rate increase more steadily, it may appears on a log scale that the spread is slowing. Take a look at Spain and Italy – it would be easy to reach the wrong conclusion here – it looks like they’re no-longer growing significantly.
It’s useful at this point to have a look at exactly the same data but plotted on a linear y-axis.

It’s clear from the linear chart above that Italy and Spain have been experiencing very similar growth over the last 2 weeks or more.

The linear chart also has the benifit of highlighting the scale of the problem in the US – this is now by far the country with the biggest problem.

However, this linear chart is poor for comparisons with smaller countries. Ireland barely get’s off the x-axis.

Let’s look at this by taking each country’s population into account.

Even taking population into account, Ireland is experiencing a much lower mortality rate than Spain, Italy and the UK.

Interesting that per 100k people, the Republic’s growth is very close to the US growth.

Comparing the growth of a virus across different countries can be complicated. Different countries experience outbreaks at different times, they have varying population sizes and population densities, not to mention they are all using slightly different methods for determining what is included/excluded. In the early days of an outbreak the virus is likely to spread…

Comparing the growth of a virus across different countries can be complicated. Different countries experience outbreaks at different times, they have varying population sizes and population densities, not to mention they are all using slightly different methods for determining what is included/excluded. In the early days of an outbreak the virus is likely to spread…