More than half of Americans have been ordered to stay at home. Businesses have been shut down. And President Trump is getting restless. There are other areas that just aren't affected or they're affected very little. And why would we close down 100% of the country? We can't have the cure to be worse than the problem. Everyone wants to return to normal quickly. But how realistic is it?
Let's compare the outbreak in the US with other countries. It started in China, of course, then the epicenter shifted to Italy, which now has over 100,000 cases. Let's bring in other countries, too. Here we compare every country on the same timeline with day one being the first day it reported 100 cases. We can see that the spike in cases in Spain, for example, was even sharper than in Italy. The one bucking the trend has been South Korea. It avoided a spike by doing one thing better than others. Experts praise South Korea. South Korea is now doing more than 10,000 tests per day. By March 1, South Korea had tested 100,000 people. While the US started on a very similar trend, it's seen its cases rise dramatically in recent days. It is now the country with the most cases in the world, topping 160,000 as of Monday. However, the increase in cases reflects the fact that the US has, after a very slow start, finally ramped up the number of tests being carried out.
Now, to get a better insight into the severity of the outbreak in each country, we need to look at how many coronavirus infections have proved fatal. These are the number of deaths for Italy, China, and South Korea, again on a timeline that allows us to compare them with day one as the first day that country had more than 25 deaths. The death toll in Italy past 5,000 after 23 days. It is now double that.
But let's look at Spain. Its curve is even steeper. It reached the 5,000-mark in 19 days.
After almost three weeks, the US has over 2,500 deaths, which puts it on a similar trajectory to France. But to understand the effectiveness of a country's response, we need to compare not just the number of deaths, but if the rates are rising or slowing down. The Chinese death rate is slowing down. We were hopeful that the Italian death rate was beginning to slow. The death rate continues to slow.
So let's look at the same numbers in a different way. This time adapted to show the rate of change over the first three weeks. This way we can see if a country succeeds in slowing the death rate. Let's start with South Korea, where a trace-test-treat strategy has been widely praised. The number of deaths there doubled every seven days.
In comparison, China saw its number of reported deaths double every three days, but it succeeded in slowing that trajectory in its third week. So far, European countries have not been able to slow their pace down and are seeing their numbers double every three days. The trend in the US has been similar until now, but the rate has increased in recent days. It's certainly nowhere near the slowing down seen in China, South Korea, or even Italy lately. We don't yet know what impact the unprecedented shutdown across much of the US will have on the outbreak. But experts say the worst is still to come. Well, things won't get back to normal until we've flattened this curve for the coronavirus. No one is going to want to tone down things when you see what's going on in a place like New York City. Now we're looking at about 21 days for a possible apex. Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won.
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