Latest updated graph from brother using Health Dept data: Another plot line commonly presented is the rate of cases by country (below). This shows cumulative cases per million people with the corresponding plot lines appearing quite close together. In fact they are deliberately manipulated for space reasons by ‘compressing’ the vertical axis, using a logarithmic transformation. Again, the perception is misleading, that countries are tracking much closer to each other than they are. Without the log scale the plot lines would be much more divergent. This misperception is compounded when the axis is not even labelled as a log scale.
