Robert Rohde, a physicist at Berkeley Earth, a climate change research institute based in California, released a data visualisation with the revelation on 2 April.

Rohde used reported case counts from Johns Hopkins University, which has been tracking the global pandemic. However, Rohde noted: “In many places, official numbers may greatly underestimate the true numbers.”

Luxembourg is followed by Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Norway, France and, with the world’s 10th highest rate of documented coronavirus cases per capita, the Netherlands.

Updated bar chart animation showing the per capita changes in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases by country.

Though the pandemic started in Asia, there is no longer any East Asian or Southeast Asian country in the top 20 by number of confirmed cases per capita. pic.twitter.com/eoWWYzYBuc

— Robert Rohde (@RARohde) April 2, 2020

Graphic source: Robert Rohde

Luxembourg’s high rate, 2,729 as of 4 April, could be explained by its relatively high rate of testing. Since the beginning of the outbreak, there have been nearly 23,000 covid-19 tests in Luxembourg, per government figures. That’s a test rate of roughly 36,400 per 1m inhabitants.

For comparison, per Our World in Data, a publication based at the University of Oxford, the rate in Germany is approximately 11,130, while in Italy it is less than 9,900, in South Korea around 8,400, in Belgium about 5,800 and in France around 3,400. On the other hand, Iceland has a test rate of about 64,600 per 1m population.

Chart source: Robert Rohde

Rohde earned a doctorate in experimental/theoretical physics from the University of California Berkeley. He is the lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a not-for-profit research outfit, but began analysing the coronavirus outbreak in early March.

Correction: This article previously mislabeled the testing rate for Belgium as the rate of another country. This was updated on 9 April at 11:45am