Author Archives: colinmathers

How does population age structure affect overall case fatality ratios for COVID-19?

Posted on April 1, 2020 by colinmathers

The first graph shows coronavirus deaths in Italy up to 26 March 2020 by sex and age. The overall case fatality rate for lab confirmed cases is 11.1% and 70% of deaths are male (closer to 80% below age 80, … Continue reading →

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COVID-19 growth rates by country

Posted on March 26, 2020 by colinmathers

Nice new site http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ that plots time trends in cases and deaths, total numbers and rates per million population. The time axis is days since 100+ cases/deaths or days since 1 case/death per million population. I’ve attached screenshots of cases/million … Continue reading →

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Covid-19 update

Posted on March 25, 2020 by colinmathers

worldometers.info now also reports coronavirus cases and deaths as rates per million population. I’ve done some updated plots for confirmed case rates, reported death rates, and apparent case fatality rates (CFR). The latter are calculated simply as reported deaths per … Continue reading →

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Looking at the COVID-19 statistics on day 3

Posted on March 19, 2020 by colinmathers

I live just a couple of kilometres from the border of Switzerland with France, and last Monday evening the border was closed except for frontaliers (who live across the border from work) and those with urgent reasons.  We are now … Continue reading →

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Declining freedom in the world

Posted on March 10, 2020 by colinmathers

Last week, Freedom House released its 2020 annual report on global freedom. The report documents trends in every region of the world of declining political and civil freedom: “In every region of the world, democracy is under attack by populist … Continue reading →

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Climate change and the denial of reality

Posted on October 12, 2019 by colinmathers

Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion have been raising awareness of the urgent need to stop talking and start acting on global warming. The evidence that global warming is real and that it is human-caused is now overwhelming, but the public … Continue reading →

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Gun ownership and gun deaths

Posted on August 8, 2019 by colinmathers

Given recent events, I took a look at the data relating to gun deaths overall and the  extraordinarily high rates of mass shootings in the USA compared to the rest of the world. Despite President Trump blaming video games and … Continue reading →

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Latest data show accelerating rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide

Posted on June 5, 2019 by colinmathers

Back in January, I posted on climate change (are-humans-heating-up-the-world) and included a graph of the Keeling curve showing the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has just released its latest results showing that atmospheric … Continue reading →

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State-level trends and levels of child mortality in India 2000-2015

Posted on May 20, 2019 by colinmathers

I’ve been involved for nearly 20 years in the estimation of global, regional and national causes of child death under the age of 5, in collaboration with academic researchers and a number of WHO technical departments (new-estimates-of-the-causes-of-child-death-under-age-5).  This collaboration has … Continue reading →

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WHO and the Global Burden of Disease

Posted on May 7, 2019 by colinmathers

As a former WHO staff member, who played a key role in the production and clearance of WHO health statistics over the last 15 years, and a long-time collaborator with the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) enterprise and with the … Continue reading →

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