The latest global data for COVID-19—updated with reports received on March 23rd, 2020—have been published at Our World in Data. Here are some of the numbers and trends that I believe deserve special attention, as well as a brief report on notable regional developments and media analyses. Since March 21st, these updates have been published at Quillette in our section marked COVID-19 UPDATES. Please report needed corrections or suggestions to [email protected].

Let me start off with some good news: For the first time in a week, the daily number of new global confirmed COVID-19 deaths has dropped—from 1,690 to 1,660. That’s a small drop, but it’s important. Since I began doing these updates informally on my Facebook page, there has always been at least one country, every day, that has reported a horrifying surge in daily death rates. (The last time that the daily death rate dropped was March 16th — 17th, and even that seemed to have resulted from the previous day’s anomalous doubling of global daily fatalities, fed by an order-of-magnitude increase in Spain, from 15 to 152 in one day.) The rate of daily new cases also fell, from roughly 34,000 to roughly 33,000.

In Italy, which has accounted for about half of all fatalities over the last week, the latest daily tally of new deaths was 649. That’s awful, but it actually represents a significant reduction from the previous day’s total of 795. There is a widely shared photo of Italian military vehicles lined up outside of a hospital, helping with the disposal of victims’ corpses, which is the sort of image we associate with apocalypse movies. The extraordinarily high apparent COVID-19 death rate in Italy will be studied by health professionals for years.