These charts show how fast COVID-19 is spreading — and what it takes to flatten the curve

As U.S. public officials, health-care workers and epidemiologists struggle to track the course of the coronavirus pandemic, they are being hampered by a dearth of data on exactly how far and how fast the virus is spreading.

Despite frequent updates by the news media, public health agencies and independent researchers tracking the outbreak, the available data represents only a portion of the total number of cases, many of which have gone unreported.

That lack of data in the U.S. is largely the result of delays in rolling out widespread testing in the early stages of the outbreak.

“Without knowing the extent and availability of testing, it is very hard to know what to make of the reported numbers,” said Yonatan Grad, a professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “For the U.S., when we see reports of numbers, they are best understood not as new cases but as identified cases where the true number of cases is unknown.”

But as testing becomes more widespread and the number of confirmed cases rises, a sharper picture is beginning to emerge of the pace of the spread of the virus.

To better track the speed of the pandemic’s spread, CNBC analyzed two months of data collected by researchers at Johns Hopkins University from multiple sources, including the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and various other national and local public health agencies around the world. The analysis looks at the pace of growth of new cases in U.S. states and in countries around the world beginning from time the outbreak began to accelerate. (To make that comparison, we adjusted each time series to start on the day each country or state began reporting more than 100 confirmed cases.)   

The full article from CNBC can be viewed at this link.