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The number of COVID-19 cases shall also be analysed in absolute and relative terms. In absolute values, the countries with the highest amount of recorded cases during the first wave of the pandemic were the United States, Brazil, India and Russia, which is consistent with their large size. However, what is striking is that some other countries with less than 70 million inhabitants also featured at the top of the list, including the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Chile, Peru and Saudi Arabia. The large amount of cases in these countries could be attributed to the high demographic densities in their urban areas, which are home to a sizeable part of their population, and the lack of an effective response to the outbreak during the initial weeks of the pandemic that allowed the virus to spread. In relative terms, the countries with worst data are the United States, Panama, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, Sweden, Belarus, Armenia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia, some of which are also amongst those worst affected in absolute terms. It shall be noted that the governments of some countries, such as the United States, Brazil and Belarus, showed some initial scepticism towards the threat of the pandemic and failed to take decisive measures to contain the spread of the virus. The evolution of the pandemic in Sweden, for example, was probably influenced by the implementation of deliberately lax lockdown measures that sought to seek a supposed herd immunity. At the opposite end of the scale, countries with fewer relative cases of COVID-19 fall into one of two categories: either they applied stringent isolation measures with exemplary levels of compliance from their populations, i.e., China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia, or they have poor levels of record-keeping, and COVID-19 is present alongside other infectious and contagious diseases (ebola, malaria, yellow fever, etc.), i.e. sub-Saharan Africa and some countries in South America and Asia.

[[File:Logo Monografía.jpg|left|thumb|300px|Map: COVID-19 cases. 2020. World.]]