Dr Rudolph Kalveks FT 29/7/2020: "Europe battles to contain surge in Covid-19 cases. Experts surprised at how fast the lifting of restrictions led to a rise in infections." Telegraph 1/8/2020: "The virus warning light is flashing." Let us see what the “Canaries in the Mine” (i.e., the coronavirus death statistics, courtesy of Worldometer) tell us about the actual development of the epidemic in Europe and other parts of the world. First of all, bearing in mind the usual caveats about reliability, we should recap the death statistics in our selection of countries. These are summarised as time series in Figure 1 below, where a logarithmic scale has been used. (An upward sloping straight line on such a graph would indicate an exponential growth rate). Figure 1. Cumulative Death Statistics for Selected Countries (July 31, 2020).Cumulative coronavirus deaths, expressed as a % of country populations, are plotted on a logarithmic scale, as time series up to July 31, 2020. Source: Worldometer. The curves show that when the penetration of coronavirus in a country reaches a ceiling, typically represented by a fatality rate below 0.1% of its population, its spread slows to a standstill, with few further fatalities arising. This certainly appears to have been the case in mainland Western Europe, where the average daily death rates from the coronavirus have now ...