World passes 500,000 coronavirus cases – U.S. overtakes Italy and China with most cases globally

26 March 2020 (Desdemona Despair) – The world reached an unhappy milestone today, as the number of confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2, aka novel coronavirus, exceeded a half-million. More than 23,000 deaths have been reported globally.

As Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, observed three days ago, “It took 67 days from the 1st reported case to reach the first 100K cases, 11 days for the second 100K, and just 4 days for the third 100K.” And now, just three more days for the fourth and fifth 100K.

At times like this, you can feel the visceral truth of physics professor Albert Bartlett’s famous quote: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

At the same time, the U.S. is very close to catching up with and surpassing Italy and China. [UPDATE: Only a few hours after posting this: US now has most cases in the world, report says. #TrumpVirus] Other indicators show that the U.S. may have the worst rate of infection growth in the world. Mark Handley, Professor of Networked Systems at University College London, has prepared the above graph (and many others) to illustrate this.

He remarks, “One thing this view shows well is how much of an outlier the U.S. is. I have aligned the curve so that the most recent point lies on the Italy/China curves, and the faster increase rate of the U.S. curve is self-evident. It looks like the U.S. may exceed Italy’s case count in as soon as five days time [Now three. –Des][Now exceeded. –Des].”