After hearing about the rapid increase in COVID-19 cases in Nepal over the past 2 weeks1, and given that the uptick in cases is very delayed compared to most of the rest of the world, I wanted to see how Nepal’s new cases per day density trajectory stacked up to other countries.
I figured I would do my own analysis and present the results here for posterity, but I found a lot of great work already done providing open access to not only data, but really good interactive graphs. Like this one.2
We are also at a kind of crossroads. Our Thai visas are about to expire in about a month at the end of July and we will soon be faced with a decision to return to Nepal or return to the U.S., our home country. We will be leaving a country that has amongst the lowest number of per capita cases3 to go to one that is amongst the highest. The plot below on a log scale illustrates this point well.
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Currently, comparing Nepal to the U.S. shows that there is nearly 10x the density of new daily cases at the country level. These numbers are alarming as it stands and makes our decision to return to Nepal a lot easier. Nepal’s relatively slow but steady rise is also troubling, but what to do with imperfect information?
Things get scarier when you look at state-level data – like with our home state of Florida where the growth of cases is the second worst in the world currently at ~2.7k new cases per day per million people.4 That is to say, Florida is literally off the chart.
The current estimate is ~11,000 cases as of this writing at ~17.41 new cases per 1 million people per day (7-day rolling average) from Our World in Data.↩
Assuming this it is still up and running as you are viewing this webpage.↩
There have been nearly no cases originating from within Thailand since its peak.↩