Visualising the doubling time of COVID-19 allows comparison of the success of containment measures

The dynamics of epidemics and pandemics are not the usual stuff of everyday conversations, but COVID-19 has changed much in our lives and is clearly destined to change much more. Many nations are now in the throes of dealing with its swift advance, but how well are the differing national approaches to COVID-19 containment performing? Initial efforts to curb its spread focused on border controls, but community-based transmission, rather than infected travellers, has required a strategy shift(1,2).Efforts are now centred on reducing person-to-person contact to limit the chances of transmission, although the daily growth of new cases demonstrates that controlling its spread within and across communities is a difficult task.