<aside> 💡 Cases per million = total cases / population * 1,000,000
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<aside> 💡 Deaths per million = total deaths / population * 1,000,000
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These numbers are a more objective way to compare the impact of the virus across regions. Knowing that Country A and Country B both have 200 cases is helpful. But if Country A is 10x smaller than Country B, Country A is actually affected much harder than Country B, despite having the same number of cases.
Keep in mind that the calculation of cases per million is based on the number of confirmed cases. Confirmed cases are likely a fraction of the actual number of all cases, including undetected/unreported/untested cases.
We were initially going to go with percentages. People are a lot more familiar with percentages. And it's quite rare to come across data expressed per million on a daily basis.
When we finished inputting all population numbers though, it became clear that this wasn't going to work. This is what it would have looked like:
So while we tend to be familiar with percentages, we're probably not very familiar with such tiny percentages. 0.04% is actually a lot more than 0.0004%. But both just look very small. 4 vs 400 or 40 vs 4000 is a lot more intuitive.
You can sort countries by cases per million or deaths by million as follows
Email us at [email protected]. We're excited to hear your feedback.