How we did the maths

Placeholder numbers These figures are a first draft and will be replaced as the research comes in.

We count patient-facing healthcare workers: the doctors, nurses, carers and support staff who are in the room with patients and would need a respirator in an airborne outbreak.

That share differs a lot between countries. Richer countries tend to have more healthcare workers per person. Because we only ask for your population, the estimate covers that whole spread, which is why the range is wide.

The curve is a log-normal distribution: the shaded band holds the middle 90% of likely values, and the fainter tails hold the rest. If you know how many healthcare workers your country actually has, that number beats this estimate.