Corona cases per population seem to be somewhat harder to find on the WWW than other data: total cases, new cases absolute, total deaths, and new deaths absolute are easy to find, see World Health Organization or European Center for Disease Control. (The latter even providing an R snippet to download their aggregated data....) Notable exception appears to be Our World in Data which provides a rich and good quality data-set related to the Corona virus.
Corona data has been replicated into fancy looking dashboards. So we now know where France is located; surprisingly still at the place it used to be before Corona .... But I've been missing a simple rendering of cases per 100'000 of population for a set of selected countries.
Evidently comparisons are difficult: not all countries count Corona cases or deaths the same way. Testing per population also varies and thus the number of reported cases differs. Also some countries report their data faster, some show no data on week-ends, etc. One does however wonder why daily reporting of cases is such an accomplishment in the days of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook....
But the data is available, in CSV format (why not a decent HTTP API for raw data?) and after some Google queries one can find the world's population per country, for example from the United Nations.
So we can get the Corona cases per 100'000 of population to compare different geographies respectively countries. Might be of interest to see how the numbers evolve over the past 180 or so days and raise curiosity why some countries differ noticeably from others... Sometimes, one just wonders.
Also of interest seems to be the testing intensity, as well as the positivity rate (i.e. how many of the tested individuals are truly positive). This data can be found too after some searching ( Our World in Data), but is only available for some countries as smoothened data (i.e. moving average) and with delayed availability.
(The data shown below is based on the World Health Organization, United Nations, and Our World in Data data. A big "thanks" for the data aggregation by these organizations.)
A somewhat more local view on Corona cases can be found for the districts of Canton Zurich.
It is now spring of 2022 and after some greek letters (delta, omicron) Corona has not yet reached the end of the Greek alphabet (which would be Omega). However, the newer variants seem to show less dramatic courses of the disease, also thanks to rapidly developed vaccines, and we now seem to migrate towards a more benign Corona world.
Thus, the updates of this site have been discontinued as per February 22, 2022.