Álvaro Calvo / Getty Images
An emergency nurse dressed in garbage bags and a protective mask at a hospital in Spain on March 31, 2020.
- Roughly 1.5 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 globally and at least 85,000 have died as the virus continues to spread.
- But daily new case numbers vary widely by country: They depend on when the novel coronavirus first appeared and how each responded to outbreaks.
- In China, where the disease originated, new daily cases have dropped significantly. But thousands of new cases are still appearing daily in the US, which has been slower to respond.
- Here's how the virus has spread over time globally as well as in China, the US, Italy, Germany, and Spain.
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Three months after Chinese health officials began treating dozens of people in Wuhan for a mysterious disease, nearly 1.5 million people have been infected with COVID-19 globally and at least 85,000 have died as the virus continues to spread.
More than one-third of the world's population, around 2.6 billion people, are under some form of lockdown as governments scramble to contain the pandemic.
But the virus is not spreading equally across countries, and how it has grown and evolved has varied depending on when countries first reported cases as well as how they've responded since then.
In some countries - including China, South Korea, and Germany - fast and aggressive action by authorities to test widely for COVID-19, isolate people who had the disease, and restrict movement helped slow the spread of the outbreak within their borders.
In South Korea, for instance, the number of new infections reported each day peaked on February 29 with 909 additional cases. Since then cases have dropped steadily, down to 53 new ones on April 8. Similarly, China appears to have largely controlled its outbreak, with fewer than 60 new cases reported on April 7 (though western governments and scientists have raised questions about the accuracy of China's reported case and death tallies).
Italy, Spain, and the US were slower to monitor and contain the spread of the coronavirus, and that delay is reflected in the number of new cases being reported daily in each country.
New daily cases and deaths don't tell the full picture, given varying levels of testing across countries, differing approaches to collecting and reporting data, and a general lag in identifying positive cases. But they're still helpful.
Here's what those numbers tell us about when and how widely the virus has spread globally and in China, the US, Italy, Germany, and Spain.
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