This article constitutes the March 28th, 2020 entry in the daily Quillette series COVID-19 UPDATES. Please report needed corrections or suggestions to [email protected].

According to statistics compiled by Our World in Data (OWD), the number of newly confirmed COVID-19 deaths increased yesterday. As reported by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) on Saturday morning, the data indicated 3,418 new confirmed COVID-19 fatalities globally. However, this figure embeds what I confirmed was an erroneous report for Argentina, artificially inflating deaths by 100. Correcting this would put the actual number of deaths at 3,318, which is still a substantial increase over Friday’s reported deaths, which were 2,684.

As has been the case over the last three weeks, the highest number of dead were in France (299), Italy (971), Spain (769), and the United States (411), and these countries accounted for over 70 percent of total global deaths reported yesterday. This figure has remained above 65 percent for 18 of the last 19 days.

The case of Italy is particularly alarming. Italy recorded its 1,000th COVID-19 death more than two weeks ago, and much of the nation has been on lockdown since early March. Precedents in numerous other parts of the COVID-19-afflicted world show that aggressive interventions typically begin to show positive effects within this time envelope. Yet Italy continues to report 30 percent of all the world’s COVID-19 deaths, and two-thirds of those deaths have taken place in the region of Lombardy, which accounts for only one-sixth of the country’s population.