Fact of the Day: COVID-19 Deaths Around the World

Test ticker

Monika Bauerlein,
CEO

Dear Reader,

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December is make-or-break for Mother Jones’ fundraising, and in "No Cute Headlines or Manipulative BS," we hope that giving it to you as matter-of-fact as we can will work to raise the $350,000 we need to raise this month. Donations make up 74 percent of our budget this year, and all online gifts will be matched and go twice as far until we hit our goal.

Every morning I post the current rate of COVID-19 deaths in eight different countries, so why am I posting this yet again today? Because I still get periodic complaints that I’m misleading people by using a different scale for each country. So here’s what it looks like using the same scale for everyone:

What do you think? The problem I have with this is that my charts are pretty small, and countries like Germany and Canada barely show up if you use the same scale that works fine for, say, France. And personally, I don’t consider it all that onerous to expect people to look at the y-axis in a series of charts.

But maybe it is onerous. Not everyone is a chart nerd, after all. So perhaps tomorrow I’ll try using a standard scale for all eight charts to see what it looks like. Weekends are made for experiments, right?