This is a really helpful chart, thanks for posting it, Otto!
It's great, and there are other things that would make it even better to put these outbreaks into perspective. For instance the vast majority of China's cases were in Hubei province, so it would be helpful to see the cases and deaths for that province alone and the cases per million population for that single region.
Same thing for Italy where most of their cases are in a smaller part of the country, and even for South Korea where I believe most cases have been focused around only two cities and it hasn't yet taken off in a big way in the capital.
One hope I have for the US is that instead of looking at the total cases for the US we should really be looking at total cases per state and comparing those to the curves in other regions. It might be that some states with higher population density overall, and those with the higher density metropolitan centres are more likely to have the potential of looking like Wuhan/Hubei, but I think it really helps to see it in the Wuhan/Hubei context rather than overall Chinese cases context when they did such an amazing of of restricting most cases and deaths to Hubei province.
ETA we also need to remember that the death rate of deaths/total current cumulative cases is going to change over time as we don't yet know the outcome for the existing current cases.
I don't know when the appropriate time to make the switch is, but I think at some point it's probably better to do deaths/cumulative recovered as both of these groups have reached their conclusion, whereas not everyone in the cumulative count has reached a conclusion to their infection.
