Welcome to our weekly newsletter highlighting the best of The Economist’s data journalism. In Off the Charts we go behind the numbers to show you how our data team gathers, analyses and visualises data for our Graphic detail section and beyond.
In Graphic detail this week, we look at how the pandemic has affected birth rates. Unsurprisingly, we find that countries that have had high covid-19 infection rates have seen their birth rates fall the most. Tougher lockdown measures and declines in economic output correlate with falling birth rates, too. But there was one unlikely measure that tracked changes in fertility most closely: visits to the park. We explore what’s going on.
Elsewhere we reported how the rising price of bitcoin has caused its environmental cost to soar. One ray of hope is that the use of renewable energy is accelerating across the globe, too.
In America, Liz Cheney, a conservative congresswoman from Wyoming, has been ousted by the Republican Party over her stance on the legitimacy of last year’s election. According to our poll with YouGov, most Republican voters won’t miss her.
A poll from Gallup shows that 43% of Americans do not support the death penalty—the highest share since the 1960s. Nevertheless, South Carolina’s Senate has confirmed a vote that will bring back the firing squad. The number of executions in America has been falling in recent years—17 executions were carried out in 2020, a 29-year low.
What could divide Americans more along party lines than the use of firearms? Perhaps the pandemic has produced an answer to that question: face masks. New guidance issued by America’s CDC recommends that everyone who has been fully vaccinated for two weeks should not need to wear masks in public, except on public transport and planes. The unexpected shift in advice has caused a stir in a country where masks are as much a political statement as an epidemiological necessity.
Joe Biden, America’s president, may declare America’s “independence from this virus” on July 4th, but the pandemic still rages in many parts of the world. In our data-driven cover briefing, we estimate that between 7m and 13m people have died since the pandemic began. Below Sondre Solstad, one of our data journalists, explains how we built a statistical model to arrive at a realistic toll of the pandemic.
If you have any comments about this newsletter, want to point us towards interesting data, or just say hello, you can reach us on offthecharts@economist.com.
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