After several injuries Brazilian pianist João Carlos Martins lost the ability to move his fingers.
Then – after more than two decades of not being able to play – a pair of bionic gloves gave him back his abilities to play the piano.
In the UK the number of cases rose rapidly.
But the public – and authorities – are only learning this now because these cases were only published now as a backlog.
The reason was apparently that the database is managed in Excel and the number of columns had reached the maximum.
Israel has now vaccinated more than a million people.
More than 10% of the country’s population.
Other countries take holidays and keep the vaccines waiting in the freezers while their populations are stuck in lockdowns and their people die by the thousands.
1/ Many of you ask me why I take the COVID-19 outbreak so seriously.
Current numbers of cases and deaths are *not* why.
👇 A thread on why I’m worried and what I do personally in this situation.
I think the visualization teams in many media outlets need to rethink how they map the war.
Most do maps like the one on the left. But that is not reflecting their own reporting. There aren't entire *areas* that are 'under control'.
On the right is a more accurate alternative.
More and more countries achieve to decouple economic growth from CO₂ emissions.
Just made this new chart that shows the evidence for 25 countries. Growth is up, emissions down.
Different German cities made masks mandatory at different points in time. This study uses a synthetic control methodology and finds that requiring face masks to be worn decreased the growth rate of COVID-19 cases by about 40% in Germany.
The Economist journalists updated their a model of the true death toll of the pandemic, corrected for underreporting.
They come to the conclusion that 15.2 million have died, more than 3-times the official toll of 4.6m.
This map shows the distribution of the death rate.
This is the first page of Paul Ehrlich's book 'The Population Bomb', published in 1968.
The book sold millions of copies and was taken very seriously.
Extraordinary how confident Ehrlich was when making these extremely dark predictions.
It was wrong to believe that 'saving the economy' was an alternative to 'saving people's lives’.
If anything it is the other way around and the two goals go together so that countries that kept the health impact of the pandemic lower suffered smaller economic consequences.
Tegnell in May:
“In the autumn there will be a second wave. Sweden will have a high level of immunity and the number of cases will probably be quite low.
…
But Finland will have a very low level of immunity. Will Finland have to go into a complete lockdown again?”
Autumn:
Chile’s vaccination campaign is impressive!
This is the average rate of daily vaccinations in EU countries and the US in comparison with Chile – relative to the population of each country and averaged over the last week.
[all our data ]
This thread is more personal than most of the things I share here, but I’m at my limit with Jason Hickel.
I want to explain why I dislike him so much and how we got here.
This is a personal story over several years so it’ll take a bit of time.
Until 50 years ago, CO₂ emissions developed in lockstep with economic growth in France.
Since the early 1970s, the opposite has been true: emissions declined as people in France got richer.
I made this new chart of global inequality:
• If you live on $30 a day you are part of the richest 15%.
• The majority of the world is very poor: the poorer half of the world – almost 4 billion people – live on less than $6.70 a day.
6/ Early in an outbreak, containment is key.
Slowing the rate of infection means that the number of people who are sick at the *same time* does not exceed the capacity of the health system.
[I wish more people understood the intention of containment.]
Russia’s exports are largely fossil fuels. A good graphic that shows which European countries import gas from Russia.
I would have made the arrows go the other way, to highlight not the flow of gas but the flow of money — and show which countries are financing Putin’s war.
Ich denke die Journalisten die ständig darauf abzielen vermeintliches Versagen in den Vordergrund zu stellen, sind Teil der Antwort warum sich nicht mehr Menschen in Deutschland impfen lassen.
Unverantwortlich jedenfalls vom Spiegel diese Schlagzeile abzudrucken.
1/n
South Korea shows that it is possible to win against
#COVID19
Testing is a big reason for their success
Daily new confirmed cases peaked 12 days ago and are falling since then.
You can see the data for all countries in our entry
Polio was once one of the most frightening global health problems.
Until 1955, the year Jonas Salk developed a vaccine against it.
When asked who owned the patent on the vaccine Salk responded:
"The people, I would say.
There is no patent.
Could you patent the sun?"
In their mission statement the
@Guardian
says that their work wants to "improve the world, not just critique it" and they want to "bring about a more hopeful future".
👇 This is their front page right now.
I am skeptical that their work "brings about a more hopeful future".
Wir leben doppelt so lange wie nur wenige Generationen vor uns.
Unser Einkommen ist knapp 10-mal so hoch wie 1950.
Die Arbeitslosenrate ist niedriger als je zuvor nach der Wiedervereinigung.
Wir sind bei der WM ausgeschieden und Der Spiegel verliert den Verstand.
I have made a world map that shows where the world population of 7.633 billion people is at home.
(Never spent as much time on a visualization before.)
Just published my new post which introduces it:
Many who don’t understand that life today is much better than in the past don’t know how bad the past was.
Many who don’t believe that the future can be much, much better don’t know how bad the present is.
Tweet that promises false hope for how to end the pandemic gets close to 150,000 likes.
Articles that explain how vaccines are actually produced are barely read.
Some people value outrage more than solutions. That seems to me a big problem for making the world a better place.
I think 'survival curves' are a great way to visualize how mortality has changed over the course of history.
It might take a moment to wrap your head around how they work, but then you can discover a lot of information in them.
Just finished this new version of such a chart.
Solar has reached prices today that are 30 to 40 years (!) ahead of what the IEA had forecast in its 2014 Solar Technology Roadmap.
An important text by
@ramez
: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap (2020 edition)
The Economist built a model to assess the death toll of the pandemic, corrected for underreporting.
They come to the conclusion that 10 million have died (with an uncertainty of 7 to 13 million).
The map shows the distribution of the death rate.
In most countries the majority of people is satisfied with their government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
From the new Democracy Perceptions Index survey:
How Europe changed since 1900:
– Croplands decreased
– Forests increased
[From the University of Wageningen’s 'Historic Land Dynamics Assessment’ research ]
Some statistics are worth knowing by heart:
The average – mean – income in the world per person is $18 per day.
This is adjusted for differences in price levels.
It means that if incomes could get perfectly equally distributed in the world all of us would live on $18 per day.
Recently
@BillGates
asked me which statistics we should all know if we want to understand how the world is changing.
Just now he published my answer on his personal website:
One of the biggest achievements of humanity: the decline of child mortality during the last 200 years.
(From my
@OurWorldInData
post on child mortality: )
7/ For that reason I do what I can to not get infected.
1] I wash my hands thoroughly. Much more often than I feel I should!
2] I don’t touch my face.
3] And I know the symptoms and how common each of them is (see my chart below).
One year ago today Hans Rosling died.
To remember him I want to share some links in this thread.
Of the many talks he gave, ’The magic washing machine’ is my favorite.
The quote explains the magic of the machine – laundry in, books out.
Here is his talk
Humanity’s history is a battle against the microbes. And for most of our history we were losing very decisively.
My new post – and visualization – on how vaccines allowed us to make progress against recurring epidemics of infectious diseases:
Updated: Now the ratio is 20.
The COVID death rate among unvaccinated people is 20-times higher than among vaccinated people.
This is the latest age-standardized data from Swizerland.
[From our post with
@redouad
on death rates by vaccination status: ]
It was wrong to believe that 'saving the economy' was an alternative to 'saving people's lives’.
We see in the data that those countries that kept the health impact low are also the countries that suffered the smallest economic consequences.
How many have died in the pandemic?
The Economist built a model that estimates the true death toll of the pandemic, corrected for underreporting.
They come to the conclusion that 17.6 million people have died.
This map shows the death rate per country.
Impressive to see how Spain transformed its electricity system.
Back in 2000, there was hardly any solar or wind and 36% came from burning coal.
Today 50% comes from renewables, 21% comes from nuclear, and less than 2% from coal.
The outbreak in Chile is now much worse than those in the worst-hit European countries.
And as you can see on the line color, Chile is testing very little. In the last week a case was confirmed per every 3! tests.
[Source: ]
If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local.
The chart shows why: transport tends to account for only a small share of greenhouse gas emissions — the differences between different food choices are much larger.
Amazing to see Chile’s vaccination campaign.
6 weeks ago Chile had done fewer vaccinations – relative to the size of the population – than the EU countries, the US, and the UK.
First they overtook all EU countries.
Then they overtook the US.
And now Chile overtook the UK.
We are at a moment in this pandemic when the virus is spreading rapidly and when millions of vaccines are produced and millions of people want to get vaccinated.
I think it should be unacceptable that we are not vaccinating people as fast as we are producing vaccines.
All three statements are true at the same time:
• The world is much better
• The world is awful
• The world can be much better
My post on the motivation to build
@OurWorldInData
– an open-access scientific publication on the world’s largest problems
I expect that the longer this pandemic lasts the clearer it will become that ‘protecting lives’ and ‘protecting the economy’ are not alternatives.
Those countries that do best in protecting lives will do best in protecting their economy.
The share of children who died before they were 5 years old in 1950 and 65 years later.
Africa: 32% ↘ 8%
Asia: 25% ↘ 4%
Oceania: 9% ↘ 3%
Latin America: 20% ↘ 2%
Northern America: 4% ↘ 0.6%
Europe: 11% ↘ 0.6%
Globally: 22% ↘ 4.5%
From our publication
@OurWorldInData
.
4/ I'm worried for 3 groups:
– Countries that do not take it seriously
– Elderly people
[because the case fatality rate for old people is high –> see chart below]
– Poorer people
[because of the lack of resources to care for severe cases –> see all of ]
India just approved the COVID vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Oxford!
Great is that Oxford licensed it on a not-for-profit basis and in India the vaccine is produced by the Serum Institute of India which has already produced 40 to 50 million doses.
The decline of COVID in Israel.
This chart is indexed to the peak of cases and shows the relative decline by age group since then.
For some time there was a slight temporary rise among younger people (who get vaccinated last).
But recently cases declined for all age groups.
I don’t see this discussed much, but this strong correlation makes me ask a lot of question about this pandemic.
This is the correlation between GDP per capita and confirmed COVID cases (per million people).
Confirmed cases, of course, are only a fraction of all cases.
Times have definitely changed.
Even though I mentioned vaccines often in the last weeks, for some reason not a single antivaxxer has pointed out how uninformed and stupid I am.
• To administer the first half a billion vaccines took 113 days
• The second half a billion 30 days
• The third half a billion 23 days
• And the fourth half a billion were administered in the last 16 days
We keep on counting on
@OurWorldInData
here:
You are missing the plot if you don't understand growth:
‘The climate was warmer before’
– It’s the rate at which the temperature increases!
‘This startup is tiny, why is it worth $2 billion’
– Look at their growth rate
‘only 1000 cases of COVID-19’
– It's the growth rate!
Daily COVID-19 vaccine doses administered per million people (7-day average):
🇮🇱 Israel 13,993
🇺🇸 United States 1,051
🇩🇰 Denmark 1,007
🇬🇧 United Kingdom 639
🇷🇺 Russia 466
🇩🇪 Germany 413
🇦🇷 Argentina 346
🇮🇹 Italy 315
🇨🇦 Canada 247
🇲🇽 Mexico 29
Our data:
I wish more people would understand that we do not have to chose between saving the economy *or* protecting the health of the population.
It’s not either/or. The goals are aligned: only if we protect people’s health can we get the economy back.
Mexico confirms currently 5,500 cases per day (black line.
But testing is very inadequate, the positive rate of Mexico is 57%.
So how many cases does Mexico actually have every day?
Different models suggest more than 130,000.
For other countries →
end] I worked through the weekends, woke up at 5 every morning and worked all day. So yes I take it very serious.
Thank you all for your many messages.
Please keep letting me know your ideas of what is needed and how I can improve my work!
We can do this.
Really happy about seeing this chart of mine in a printed book.
@EdwardTufte
included my chart on life expectancy vs health expenditure in his latest book!
“It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together. It is not a question of one nation winning at the expense of another.
We must all help one another or all perish together.”
– Carl Sagan
No we have not been able to find COVID vaccination data for Spain.
If someone is aware where the Spanish government is publishing this data please let us know.
As recently as the beginning of June the US and Canada had the same death rate.
While the US is unfortunately getting back to the rate from back then, Canada achieved a 20-fold reduction of the death rate at the same time.
4] I work from home.
And I asked everyone in the team to work from home so that we do our part to slow down the rise of the epidemic curve.
If you can stay at home do it, it is the prosocial thing to do.
Do it for the others (doctors, police…) who cannot stay at home right now.
Many mammal populations increased strongly in Europe.
A huge turnaround after thousands of years of decline.
Thanks to environmental conservation programs and more productive agriculture:
1950 on the left:
Global life expectancy was 46 years.
In Africa the average was 36
In India 35 years
2015 on the right:
Global life expectancy is 71 years.
In Africa it is 61 (same as Japan in 1950)
In India it is 68 (close to the healthiest country in 1950 – Norway with 72)
Malaria is one of the big killers of young children globally.
A new vaccine against malaria showed an efficacy of 77% in a trial in Africa!
This is very good news.
This vaccine was also developed by the scientists here at
@UniofOxford
.
Countries that I'm worried about.
– None of them have bent the curve: The number of new confirmed cases is increasing day after day.
– None of them is testing widely: The rate of positive tests is shown as the line color.
[link to the interactive chart ]