About these pages

These pages began during the pandemic. Their first form was not an article but a set of charts updated day by day, as the figures came out, so that the course of events could be seen almost in real time. The text came much later, once the period had closed and could be read as a whole instead of one day at a time.

Countless things have been written about the course of the pandemic in Greece, but far fewer attempted a clear, comparable picture between Greece and other European countries. Most presentations stay either with absolute numbers or with isolated charts, without bringing the data to a common measure. This article attempts exactly that: to turn scattered epidemiological and health-service data into a single, readable picture.

A common measure

Wherever possible, quantities are expressed as percentages or ratios of each country's population and not as raw absolute numbers. Ten thousand deaths do not mean the same thing in a country of ten million and in one of eighty. Scaling per inhabitant does not solve every problem, but it is the minimum condition for a comparison to start making sense. The exception is the pages that show Greece alone, where no comparison is made and the numbers stay absolute.

Several levels, not one

Cases, deaths, vaccination coverage, excess mortality, hospital admissions, ICU and nursing staff are not examined as independent topics but as pieces of the same picture. Where one quantity is not enough, it is set against another: deaths are judged not only against cases, but also against vaccination, admissions, ICU beds and staffing. And where the official records differ from country to country, excess mortality is used as an independent check, because it does not depend on what each country classes as a COVID death.

This method also has a consequence for reading: a finding counts here when it survives more than one indicator. Where one indicator shows something the others do not confirm, that is noted rather than passed over in silence.

What this is not

This is not an academic study, nor a proof of a theory with statistical certainty. It is a journalistic synthesis of the available figures, meant to let the reader see not only what happened in Greece, but also how that picture stands next to other countries. There is no statistical hypothesis testing, no confidence intervals are computed and there is no adjustment for age structure.

No such comparison is perfect. Countries differ in age structure, definitions, testing intensity, health system organisation and recording quality, and all of that leaves a mark on the numbers. Correlation is not causation: waves are also shaped by variants, seasonality and behaviour. The conclusions here should be read as an attempt to understand the available data, not as the last word. Even so, the comparison remains necessary: without such scaling and juxtaposition, all that is left is disconnected numbers and impressions.

Checking and reproducing

Every number on these pages is produced from the primary data by code, not by hand, and the tables and charts are rebuilt from scratch at every update. The references to the data sources and to the analysis code are at the end of the main article, so that anyone who wishes can check or reproduce the calculations.

Licence

The text and charts of these pages are made available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). You may republish, translate and build upon them, including commercially, on one condition: credit the author and link back to the source. The licence was chosen so that the findings can circulate as widely as possible.

The analysis code is made available separately, under an MIT licence. The data themselves are not licensed from here: they belong to the organisations that produce them and are governed by their own terms. The JHU CSSE case and death data in particular are made available for educational and research use, so anyone using them as they stand is bound by those terms. What is licensed here is my own contribution: the text, the selection and synthesis of the figures and the form of the charts.