6 months into the coronavirus pandemic, 9 maps and charts show how it took over the world

In just half a year, the COVID-19 virus has traveled across the globe, spread under the radar, and revealed the flaws of delayed responses.
These nine maps and charts show how the pandemic has evolved so far and what to expect next.
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It's been six months since China first told the World Health Organization about a new outbreak of mysterious, severe pneumonia cases.

Since that report set off alarm bells on December 31, the coronavirus has spread across the globe, forced a third of the world's population to shelter at home, and killed more than 512,000 people.

After half a year of dealing with the virus, the numbers offer a clearer picture of how it spread and how the world responded to it.

Here's what the data reveals about the pandemic so far.

In the six months since China reported the first coronavirus cases to the WHO, more than 10.5 million people have gotten sick. But of course, those are just the confirmed cases the true number is likely far higher.

The WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic on March 11. The virus had spread to nearly every country in the world by March 25. The pandemic has since become the biggest in a century.

Rampant community spread prompted unprecedented nationwide lockdowns in March and April, affecting a third of the global population.

By the end of March, more people were under lockdown than were alive during WWII .

As more people died, the COVID-19 death rate increased. However, the virus almost certainly doesn't kill 5.8% of the people it infects.

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Limited testing means that many countries identify most of their severe and deadly cases, but few of their mild cases. That means that the case fatality rate a calculation of the number of known deaths out of the total number of confirmed cases is artificially high .

Because coronavirus cases progress over a period of weeks, and because the numbers are constantly changing, the case fatality rate is always in flux.

Experts think the true death rate is closer to 1% which is still 10 times higher than that of seasonal flu.

Once the coronavirus arrived in the US, it spread rapidly and largely undetected.

The coronavirus probably reached the US long before anyone detected it, and it began spreading before the country had the testing to monitor it. By March 26, the US had reported a larger outbreak than China. The country has recorded more than 2.6 million cases and 127,000 deaths.

New York had the largest outbreak in the US during the first surge of infections.

As the nation sheltered in place, New York state alone had more coronavirus cases than any country outside the US. Now after weeks of lockdown and more than 32,000 deaths the state is detecting fewer and fewer cases each day.

But in most other states, a new surge has followed the reopening of businesses and loosening of restrictions.

Several weeks can pass between when somebody comes into contact with the virus and when they start to show symptoms or seek a test. From there, processing a test can take up to a week. So it took awhile to see the new cases brought about by lifting lockdowns.

In the last week, the US's daily case counts have been higher than ever .

"This is a continuation of the first wave," Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told Business Insider . "Some places that might have been relatively spared early on in the winter and the spring are now facing cases higher than they had before."

Though testing has ramped up, the increase in daily COVID-19 tests does not account for the increase in daily case counts.

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Andy Kiersz/Business Insider

As they roll back or delay their reopenings , several governors have said that the rising case counts can't be due to better testing alone. If that were the case, the portion of tests coming back positive would remain about the same.

Instead, in many states and cities with growing outbreaks, 20% or more of COVID-19 tests are returning positive results. Nationwide, the rate of positive tests has increased daily since June 16, according to data from Johns Hopkins University .

The US has become a global outlier along with Brazil, where cases have skyrocketed since May.

Experts have criticized the US response for reopening too soon , as well as failing to establish the basic testing and contact tracing infrastructure that could help control the country's outbreak.

Brazil has not implemented a lockdown and does not seem to be expanding testing or healthcare capacity sufficiently.

Both nations almost certainly have far more cases than their data shows.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO's director-general, said this week that "globally, the pandemic is actually speeding up." He warned that the worst is yet to come.

See a full timeline of how the world has responded to the coronavirus pandemic over the last six months.