In this video John Burn-Murdoch (the creator of the FT charts) discusses why they decided against showing numbers per capita. https://mobile.twitter.com/janinegibson/status/1244519429825...
There's also this tweet additionally showing how population size of a country has no relationship to pace of disease spread. https://mobile.twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1246185741304...
There's another surprising reason why per capita numbers aren't useful - for exponential growth on the typical type of graph starting at some "initial" number of cases, it makes no difference! For example, if one country was counted a two equal half-sized countries, their graphs would be the same shape but shifted to the right by a few days. However, they would also reach their "initial" number of cases where the graphs start at a few days later - shifting them left by the same amount! The result would be the same line as the full-sized country.
Re:Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots
by rootusrootus on Saturday April 04, 2020 @03:10PM
(#22780671)
Good points, but that could be generalized to say that we might as well look only at the worldwide spread. But we look at countries because policies tend to follow those boundaries, so we can see how different choices affect outcome. In the case of the US, we should ignore the national total and look at individual states, because that is where nearly all the policy decisions are made. This might be true of other nations, as well.
You end up missing critical data points like the per 100k population mortality rates (from Friday morning):
New York 12, Louisiana 6.6, New Jersey 6, Michigan 4.2, Washington 3.5, Connecticut 3.1, Massachusetts 2.2, Colorado 1.7, Georgia 1.67, Nevada 1.27, Illinois 1.23, Delaware 1.2, Pennsylvania 0.7, Ohio 0.7, Florida 0.68, Kentucky 0.68, Alabama 0.65, South Carolina 0.6, Wisconsin 0.53, California 0.5, Oregon 0.5, Maine 0.5, Idaho 0.5, Virginia 0.48, Arizona 0.45, Kansas 0.44, New Hampshire 0.36, Iowa 0.34, New Mexico 0.33, Minnesota 0.32, Nebraska 0.32, Missouri 0.31, Texas 0.24, North Carolina 0.15, Hawaii 0.14
Italy 23, Spain 22, Belgium 8.8, France 8, the Netherlands 7.8, Switzerland 6.2, UK 4.5, Sweden 3, Denmark 2.1, Ireland 2, Portugal 2, Austria 1.8, Germany 1.3, Norway 0.9, Canada 0.37, Finland 0.34, Australia 0.11, New Zealand ~0
Most of the US is seeing very low per capita mortality rates and no surge in cases. You wouldn't know that by the headlines though.