Coronavirus Deaths by U.S. State and Country Over Time: Daily Tracker

As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, people are dying around the world. But the trajectories of cases and deaths differ by country.

The accompanying chart, which will update every morning, allows you to follow the disease’s progression by country. It uses what’s called a logarithmic scale — exponential growth at different rates will appear as straight lines of different steepness. The steeper the line, the higher the growth rate and the faster the total number of coronavirus deaths is doubling.

Another way of looking at the same information is to plot the growth rates directly. With epidemics, these rates are often more important than the current totals. A reading of 40 percent on the chart below means that, on average, the number of deaths has been increasing by 40 percent each day. A reading of 100 percent would mean that cases were doubling daily.

The number of deaths from the illness known as Covid-19 provides one of the more reliable measurements of the pandemic’s impact around the world. Testing rates for the virus differ so much that the number of positive results in a given country is not a precise barometer of how many people are afflicted. But deaths also lag infections substantially; evidence from China suggests that most patients who died from Covid-19 were infected for a month before their death.

See the spread of coronavirus on a map.

The data are drawn from The New York Times’s aggregation of global coronavirus statistics. To make it easier to compare the trajectories of the epidemic by nation, the counts in the chart all begin with a country’s 25th death. The disease has reached different countries at different times, but comparing them all in this way can show whether the disease is progressing faster or slower in various places once it arrives.

Deaths in U.S. States

Compare the growth of the coronavirus outbreak in hundreds of communities across the U.S.

Similar tracking shows how the disease is progressing in different U.S. states. Deaths so far have been highest in New York. But the numbers are growing in other parts of the country as well. As death totals in any state reach 25, they will be added to this chart.

Deaths are not a perfect proxy for total infections, since the fatality rate from the disease depends on the underlying age and health of populations; the availability of various treatments; and the capacity of different health systems themselves. But they remain one of the best available measurements to compare places right now.

Tracking the Coronavirus