Statistics_Data_Facts

In June 2016, Bill Gates topped the Forbes list with a fortune of $88.8 billion (roughly $123.9 billion adjusted for inflation). At the time, that was treated as a number almost too large to picture. A decade later, it wouldn't crack the world's top five. Michael Dell holds fifth place in 2026 with $234.5 billion. That is nearly double what made you the richest human alive in 2016. Jeff Bezos, in fourth, has more than doubled his own 2016 total. And at the top, Elon Musk's net worth has passed $1.2 trillion: roughly ten times what it took to be the richest person on Earth just ten years earlier. Numbers this large lose practical meaning and become abstract concepts. Wealth accumulates in a way that compounds faster than almost anything else in the economy: wages, prices, GDP. Wages are linear and capped by hours in a day, while assets compound. A salary buys groceries and pays rent; an investment portfolio generates returns that get reinvested, generating further returns, i...

  Anosmia, or the loss of smell, is one of the most common manifestations of COVID-19, and one of the symptoms that differentiates it from other diseases with similar characteristics.  As it is clearly evident in the graph, during the first months of the pandemic when few things about COVID-19 were known and testing was scarce, many individuals noticed the loss of smell and turned to the internet to find out what was wrong. The magnitude of these searches at the end of March 2020, translated a few weeks later to hundreds of deaths.  The story repeated itself many times, throughout all COVID-19 waves. People noticed they couldn't smell, searched it on Google, and then a few days later cases were up, and a few weeks later deaths rose as well.  The average interval between the spikes on Google Search Trends (GST) and Cases is about 9 days, while between GST and Deaths is 18 days. Thus Google search interest can be considered a good indicator of future Covid-19 outbreaks...