Coronavirus Data Analysis: Very Worrying Findings

I have been digging into the coronavirus data. First of all, the easiest one to access: Worldometer,
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
A useful data source, although it only gives historic data for the total case count and the death count. In their raw form, these accumulating totals are not very informative, so I turned them into a "counts per day" form and then plotted them on a log scale. Here is the cases per day graph.

The useful thing about using a log scale is that exponential increases (a sign of uncontrolled growth) show up as straight lines. On the left side of the graph you can see exponential growth that took place in China, early in the epidemic. Then, there is a dip, as China brought their outbreak under control. On the right. On the right, we see case rate increase again as the virus takes off in Europe. I was initially reassured that this growth seems to be slowing down. But then I took a look at the death rate graph.

The notable feature is that the death rate seems to be accelerating, if anything. It is now at its highest rate ever, surpassing the peak of the Chinese wave. Was this discrepency just a glitch?

To understand more, I downloaded the Johns Hopkins University dataset from GitHub. This seems to be the best source of simple, QC'd data on Covid-19. I scratched out some Python code to do similar plots, broken down by country, and focusing on a few places of interest; especially Hubei, North Korea, Iran and some key European countries. Below are the case rate and death rate plots:

Look at the death rate graph... Most noticeable is the exponential growth occurring in Italy. Also in Iraq, although at a slightly lower rate. This shows that the epidemic is completely out of control in these countries. Now look back at the new case count graph. The growth for these countries is tailing off. So I did a cross check of deaths reported against total cases. Below is the result.

The ratio of deaths to true cases (i.e. the fatality rate) SHOULD be relatively constant. So, a high apparent death rate indicates a very poor rate of detecting cases. So, what this shows is that Italy has exponential increase in cases and deaths, but a terrible, and worsening, case detection rate via testing., almost ten times worse than the best performers. Iran are at least slightly mire under control. The UK is doing better, and Korea, who seem to have things under control now, have done best of all.

The lesson: Beware Italy and Iran. They have immense problems and no solution in sight.