COVID-19 Index
By Richard Bruce BA, MA, and PhC in Economics

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Using the Wayback Machine to track COVID-19

If you want to track the growth of COVID-19 in a particular country you may be able to do it on the worldometer site. They have lots of day by day stats for China, Italy, South Korea, France, Spain, the UK, Germany, Iran, and the USA. Just click on the countries which are written in blue and underlined on the table that gives today's figures for each country.

If you want to track the growth of COVID19 in a country not on this list you can use a web site, the Wayback Machine, also called the internet archive, to find the older versions of the worldometer web page on COVID19. These pages will give you the older statistics for each country.

Here is the link to the index page for the older versions of worldometer's COVID19 page.

Wayback Machine page on COVID-19

To find the final statistics for a day hover over a date, a menu will spring up listing all the times they took a snapshot, click on the last snapshot. Recently this has been taken about ten minutes from the end of the day.

I have noted that the last figures for the day are still up on the first archived pages for the next day. The numbers seem to be exactly the same. So the numbers on worldometer may not be exact, but they stick with them any way.

Perhaps there is another source that allows you to get the numbers without all this work. If so please share it with us.

Here is an example of what you can do with this data. This gives you the first two weeks and a day of growth of deaths in Korea. The two weeks start on February 19th and go to March 5th. The first number is the new deaths for that day, the second is the total as of that day.

Day by Day Korean Stats for COVID-19, Feb 19 - Mar 5

16th 0/0	17th 0/0	18th 0/0	19th 0/0	20th 1/1	21st 1/2	22nd 0/2
23rd 4/6	24th 2/8	25th 3/11	26th 1/12	27th 1/13	28th 3/16	29th 1/17
1st 4/21	2nd 7/20	3rd 6/24	4th 3/35	5th 5/40

At this writing the good news is that the number of deaths seems to have stabilized for several days. The peak was seven deaths on March 2nd. If that continues that suggests that with vigourous action the problem might be contained to relatively low numbers while we wait for a vacine, antivirals, or the natural tendency for pathnogens to become less dangerous over time.

I have found another important site with COVID-19 data that you can use this WayBack Machine technique with. This website has the country by country data on how many tests have been preformed. You can put the URL in the WayBack Machine yourself, or you can use the this link to the relevant index page on the WayBack Machine.

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Why COVID-19 worse than flu, the numbers

COVID-19 Index