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Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries

48 points by prostoalex 7y ago

rurban 7y ago
NPR did better reporting on this phenomenon than German media, well done!
- Semaphor 7y ago
  They did? There was literally nothing in there that hasn’t been said several times and the structure of this pretty short article was "1. Official data and official analysis; 2. A single anecdote as counterpoint; 3. Meaningless official opinion on the anecdote that’s meaningless as it’s nothing but a single anecdote". I like NPR, but highlighting this as "better reporting"?
  - rurban 7y ago
    So far I only read the Welt interview with the 2nd German expert who is on site. The famous one, who dominates the media, is only sitting in his lab in Berlin and looks at the numbers. He always talks about fantastic the testing goes, but only in this article you'll see why. Whilst on site you see nothing much, as you won't get tested if you cannot prove contact and risk or symptoms. Only symptoms will not get you tested, even in Germany. Only Korea is able to do that. So anecdotes are appreciated. Maybe manifacturing and PCR sequencer availability and how these tests are now prepared automatically should have been mentioned also. But nobody went that far. Only the recent Atlantic article on Quest touches that a bit.
RickJWagner 7y ago
So much contradictory information through this epedemic. CNN just ran an article highly critical of decentralized approaches. (They were advocating top-down, unified actions on a country-wide basis.) Here, NPR tells us Germany is doing well because the regions are able to act autonomously. Hard for us armchair quarterbacks.
- lainga 7y ago
  How do you feel when you watch a political debate?
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  perhaps centralized vs not isn’t a first order concern? maybe how educated the population is and or what they value in their elected officials is, or other cultural things.
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  The one big difference between USA and Germany i got from article is one place found a test and shared it and every German state adapted it, they didn’t have to wait or rely on FDA or CDC like we in USA with our early problems exposed in Washington state outbreak and still present at time of NYC outbreak. Other places I’ve read each German state is reporting deaths differently so that death rate could be misleading.
- Semaphor 7y ago
  The "decentralized approach" thing wrt Germany is something I’ve seen mentioned several times in English media (I assume Drosten said it in a press conference). I don’t know how it is in other countries, but it seems to me this is only great in comparison to the US problems of broken centralization, and only regarding the testing. There are several demands of higher centralization in Germany when it comes to information: reporting of cases, information about hospital beds, and distribution of patients based on those.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    I think if you look at the level of care in Germany that you get even in remote towns (corona virus aside), there is a lot to be said for the decentralised model. A lot of states, not just the US have highly unequal public infrastructure. France being one of the bigger examples, but the UK too. There's a very basic Hayekian argument about the problems of concentrating so much knowledge and capacity in the capital alone. It simply impedes flow of information, it creates distrust and simply put dysfunction. People in the anglosphere don't just ask these questions about Germany when it comes to healthcare, they also often ask them when they see regions like the Rustbelt or North England and compare it to the German Mittelstand. In many ways the centralised model is broken.
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I think in the end the number I'll judge countries by is how low they held the death rate per population. A better number would be a population death rate weighted by demographics, but I don't think that'll be easy to construct. Increasing the denominator by testing lots and lots of people is important only if testing lots and lots of people helps you prevent more people from dying. Germany is doing pretty well on this front compared to its European neighbors. But if you look at its absolute death rate graph it is headed up and to the right, like everywhere else. It'll be a little while before the dust settles and we can actually see whose public health policies were effective.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  In the long-term it might also be important to look at the economy at least a few years down the line. It might be that some countries will find it very difficult to recover from the crisis because the lockdown hurt the economy too much. That has a cost in lives too.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    > That has a cost in lives too. Four times as many people have already died from COVID-19 as are ever supposed to have died from great recession excess suicides, and we are just getting started with COVID-19. And the effect of recessions on overall mortality is much less clear (fewer die in commuting car accidents during recessions, for example). There's just no plausible way that a recession following this pandemic will kill more folks than the pandemic itself will, not even close.
    - Exmoor 7y ago
      Suicides is certainly the most obvious and explicit way to measure loss of life from the 2008 recession, but it's certainly not the whole story. Overdose deaths (70,000+ in 2018 in the US), and other addiction-related deaths are probably significantly exasperated by economic crisis. I'm not arguing that the deaths from the virus won't outnumber deaths related to the quarantine, but they will be significant. They will also be much more likely to involve younger people whereas the virus is mostly killing people who are within a 10 years of reaching the average life expectancy for their country or above.
wavesounds 7y ago
If theres a silver lining to this pandemic hopefully it will make people realize the importance of having competent leaders and institutions.
- Zenst 7y ago
  Hypothetical question - If you had to pick a leader from anybody in the World, from the entire history of humanity to lead in such a situation - who would you pick and why?
  - tatersolid 7y ago
    Eisenhower. He steered us through the greatest catastrophe the world has ever seen, and was wary of his own power.
losvedir 7y ago
Worth noting this is from last week. What's Germany's rate now? Since Germany started testing extensively and early, and death is a lagging indicator, I wouldn't be surprised if this creeps up to the more expected ~1.5% we see in Korea or the Diamond Princess. I check the worldometers numbers everyday, and already Germany is up about half a percent from when that article was written, but I'm not totally sure that site's numbers are trustworthy.
- adventured 7y ago
  The latest I have is 1.08%. Johns Hopkins has it at 775 deaths on 71,808 cases. Their very low mortality rate has held throughout, and they currently have a very large number of recovered patients, implying it's holding through the progression (most countries with good mortality numbers lose that as the cases get worse; you can spot this delay by the very low recovery cases as a percentage). So far among nations in Western Europe, 1.08% is extraordinary. France is at 6.6% at a similar point in recovered cases vs positive tests. And Germany is the second oldest nation at the median, behind Japan, among major nations. That mortality rate is a remarkable achievement so far.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    They are doing well enough that they confidently use their excess ICU capacity to help other countries.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    > and they currently have a very large number of recovered patients And note that the real number of recovered patients is certainly higher than reported in those dashboards, because while reporting infections and deaths is mandatory, some municipalities report recoveries, others don't, and on the whole, reporting recoveries is low priority, even for those who do report them.
  - Zenst 7y ago
    That also may be case of better testing and by that, more widespread. Many countries playing catch up, well they all are and may well be case that many countries with high death rates also have many untested people who had what they thought was mild cold and in some countries those mild cold's would of been tested. So it is one of those things when we won't be able to compare until down the line, and able to compare like for like.
antidaily 7y ago
Less fat people.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  FWIW, a quick Google tells me that the obesity rate in Germany is higher than it is in the US. I didn't down-vote you, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Germany I suppose it's possible that the WHO and the CDC use different BMI thresholds, though.
  - fiblye 7y ago
    Germans may have a higher rate of obesity, but obese Americans seem to be more chunky than obese Germans. [1] The number of times I've seen someone who's clearly 400+ pounds outside of America has been maybe 4, 5 times? In the US, I'll see at least one or two people around that weight daily. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body_weight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body_weight
    - AlexCoventry 7y ago
      You seem to have left off the reference you wanted to cite with "[1]".
    - bleah1000 7y ago
      I don't think that proves anything one way or another. For example, it could mean that there are a smaller number of really obese people in America who are driving up the numbers. Therefore, there are fewer obese people in America when compared to Germany. Or it could be that your anecdote doesn't hold true. That someone who's visited Germany could say the exact same thing as you, that they always see people who are really obese.
      - fiblye 7y ago
        The link I included shows Americans being 20 pounds heavier on average.
jdkee 7y ago
testing, testing, testing
s9w 7y ago
The media should stop calling this death rate or corona deaths. These deaths are not (all) from the virus, rather occurred in people who died and had a positive test. These things can be (and I assume are) vastly different. Just as a thought experiment: The same metric would give herpes a 100% death rate.
- sgc 7y ago
  Influenza related death rates are estimated after the fact from several sources of data and are about 25x higher than official influenza confirmed deaths. Everybody talks about the number of influenza related deaths as the real death rate. the chance is coronavirus related deaths are also higher, not lower, than the official count.
  - s9w 7y ago
    How is that possible if every death is counted as corona death? Besides a missing test of course.
    - sgc 7y ago
      There are plenty of missing tests. Testing is limited almost everywhere. Due to the testing that is in place I don't expect the same ratio, but also, not all countries count all tested deaths as corona deaths, only a few do as far as I understand.
      - s9w 7y ago
        Fair enough. From what I make of this all we do not have strong enough data to really say this is as bad as we make it. We'll see in a month or two I guess when we can conclusively look at the total mortality.
        sgc 7y ago
        I agree we don't know yet, it could be worse or better. But I think it will take a year or two to know based on how long it takes to do a post mortem on an influenza season. Certainly failure to quarantine would be devastating so whatever the final numbers are is irrelevant. We already have overwhelmed health systems around the world, and the fatality rate would be a whole different level if that was more widespread.
_trampeltier 7y ago
I know from italy for ex. if you are tested positive on Corona, no matter how you die (a tank drove over you twice) you will end up in the "death with Corona" spreadsheet. I don't know about other countrys does this handle. Also normaly, if very old people get sick (like my grandma died) they don't go to the emergency hospital. They might go to a hospital, but usually they don't try to save lives at all costs.
- splintercell 7y ago
  How many Corona positive people are dying of non-Coronavirus related issues? Is that number really that much to impact the total figures?
  - s9w 7y ago
    The age distribution is quite a signal that this is plausible. Then we have the Italian study that said only 1% had no other comorbidity. And then you have a few cases with enough details to go looking, usually the first death in a city/region or notable cases. As a random example this: https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/first-lehigh-county-resident-to-die-from-the-coronavirus-was-80-official-says.html https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/first-l...
    - vanniv 7y ago
      Yowza, Fellow falls hits his head, dies from head trauma -- but because he had COVID, he "succumbed to the virus" Good grief
  - vanniv 7y ago
    Normally, if be tempted to say "not many, probably" but The median fatal case in Italy is an 81-year old with 2 comorbidities (typically two of: heart disease, COPD, diabetes, obesity). An 81-year-old has a ~10% chance of dying in any given year, and an 81-year-old with serious underlying medical conditions is even likelier to die. If you're an 81-year-old with serious underlying health issues, you have a material chance of death generally in a 2-month period (which the coronavirus has been there). On top of that, for those folks, every illness is a high-risk occurrence (even a simple cold). The situation in Italy now is bad enough that there are definitely many COVID deaths that wouldn't have happened without COVID. But it is almost certainly the case that a meaningful number of these patients would have died in those two months anyway. (Roughly 2% of all 80+ population would have died in that time if the virus didn't exist; it seems very likely that that 2% would be disproportionately inclusive of those with serious underlying health issues -- which are the people most killed with COVID.
jariel 7y ago
a) Not the death rate. It's just 'deaths/tested' which is something else. b) I don't see how the decentralized system entails more testing. Canada is decentralized and has more testing by the US, but it's because the respective authorities 'just did it'. The logic of 'some labs blocking others' makes no sense. If S. Korea wanted to do 'the most testing' it might be in their self-interest to 'centrally plan' thereby ensuring that it's also pointed in the right direction. c) Canada has 1/3 the per-capita cases of Germany.
omazurov 7y ago
The article could have mentioned this as well: German researchers want to send out hundreds of thousands of coronavirus-antibody tests over the coming weeks, Der Spiegel reported. People who test positive for the antibodies could be given an "immunity certificate" that would allow them to leave their coronavirus lockdown early. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, are planning mass testing to ease lockdowns. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-germany-covid-19-immunity-certificates-testing-social-distancing-lockdown-2020-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-germany-covid-19...
kanox 7y ago
This is because other countries are understating infection counts because of poor testing. Wikipedia has a very interesting table with testing stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#National_stats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#National_stat... Many countries or regions have extremely high positive test ratios, for example Lombardy is at 37% positive, France at 20% while Germany is at 7.4% and South Korea at 2.4%. If Lombardy tested more people they would find many many more cases and their reported death rate would decrease. The fact that areas with high infection counts like New York and Northern Italy are reporting high positive test ratios is terrifying. It means that they are doing worse than the numbers indicate and they're limited by testing capacity.
vanniv 7y ago
There is an aspect that is missing in this article's analysis: what counts as a COVID-caused death. In Italy, for example, all in-hospital deaths of COVID-positive patients are recorded as COVID deaths. If you're 85 years old, with emphysema, heart disease, diabetes, and COVID, and you die of acute respiratory distress... did COVID kill you? In Italy, it did, 100% In New York, it is up to the doctor who declares you dead, but it probably did. In Germany, it most likely didn't. That is not to say that Germany isn't doing a good job -- they are. They are doing a lot of testing, isolating, and contact tracing. They are also going full-speed-ahead with the experimental hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin treatment, offering it everyone without contraindications, starting almost from the beginning of the outbreak. Both of those things contribute to the low death rate. They are also detecting a higher percentage of cases, which automatically lowers the apparent mortality (since every country detects most of the hospitalizations, more testing means finding more inherently non-lethal cases, meaning more detected recoveries)
- s9w 7y ago
  In Germany too. Every death plus Positive sars-cov-2 test == death "from" corona
IXxXI 7y ago
Germany's numbers are as accurate as china's.

48 points by prostoalex 7y ago

rurban 7y ago

NPR did better reporting on this phenomenon than German media, well done!

Semaphor 7y ago
They did? There was literally nothing in there that hasn’t been said several times and the structure of this pretty short article was "1. Official data and official analysis; 2. A single anecdote as counterpoint; 3. Meaningless official opinion on the anecdote that’s meaningless as it’s nothing but a single anecdote". I like NPR, but highlighting this as "better reporting"?
- rurban 7y ago
  So far I only read the Welt interview with the 2nd German expert who is on site. The famous one, who dominates the media, is only sitting in his lab in Berlin and looks at the numbers. He always talks about fantastic the testing goes, but only in this article you'll see why. Whilst on site you see nothing much, as you won't get tested if you cannot prove contact and risk or symptoms. Only symptoms will not get you tested, even in Germany. Only Korea is able to do that. So anecdotes are appreciated. Maybe manifacturing and PCR sequencer availability and how these tests are now prepared automatically should have been mentioned also. But nobody went that far. Only the recent Atlantic article on Quest touches that a bit.

RickJWagner 7y ago

So much contradictory information through this epedemic. CNN just ran an article highly critical of decentralized approaches. (They were advocating top-down, unified actions on a country-wide basis.) Here, NPR tells us Germany is doing well because the regions are able to act autonomously. Hard for us armchair quarterbacks.

lainga 7y ago
How do you feel when you watch a political debate?
gameswithgo 7y ago
perhaps centralized vs not isn’t a first order concern? maybe how educated the population is and or what they value in their elected officials is, or other cultural things.
stevenwoo 7y ago
The one big difference between USA and Germany i got from article is one place found a test and shared it and every German state adapted it, they didn’t have to wait or rely on FDA or CDC like we in USA with our early problems exposed in Washington state outbreak and still present at time of NYC outbreak. Other places I’ve read each German state is reporting deaths differently so that death rate could be misleading.
Semaphor 7y ago
The "decentralized approach" thing wrt Germany is something I’ve seen mentioned several times in English media (I assume Drosten said it in a press conference). I don’t know how it is in other countries, but it seems to me this is only great in comparison to the US problems of broken centralization, and only regarding the testing. There are several demands of higher centralization in Germany when it comes to information: reporting of cases, information about hospital beds, and distribution of patients based on those.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  I think if you look at the level of care in Germany that you get even in remote towns (corona virus aside), there is a lot to be said for the decentralised model. A lot of states, not just the US have highly unequal public infrastructure. France being one of the bigger examples, but the UK too. There's a very basic Hayekian argument about the problems of concentrating so much knowledge and capacity in the capital alone. It simply impedes flow of information, it creates distrust and simply put dysfunction. People in the anglosphere don't just ask these questions about Germany when it comes to healthcare, they also often ask them when they see regions like the Rustbelt or North England and compare it to the German Mittelstand. In many ways the centralised model is broken.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

I think in the end the number I'll judge countries by is how low they held the death rate per population. A better number would be a population death rate weighted by demographics, but I don't think that'll be easy to construct. Increasing the denominator by testing lots and lots of people is important only if testing lots and lots of people helps you prevent more people from dying. Germany is doing pretty well on this front compared to its European neighbors. But if you look at its absolute death rate graph it is headed up and to the right, like everywhere else. It'll be a little while before the dust settles and we can actually see whose public health policies were effective.

Mirioron 7y ago
In the long-term it might also be important to look at the economy at least a few years down the line. It might be that some countries will find it very difficult to recover from the crisis because the lockdown hurt the economy too much. That has a cost in lives too.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  > That has a cost in lives too. Four times as many people have already died from COVID-19 as are ever supposed to have died from great recession excess suicides, and we are just getting started with COVID-19. And the effect of recessions on overall mortality is much less clear (fewer die in commuting car accidents during recessions, for example). There's just no plausible way that a recession following this pandemic will kill more folks than the pandemic itself will, not even close.
  - Exmoor 7y ago
    Suicides is certainly the most obvious and explicit way to measure loss of life from the 2008 recession, but it's certainly not the whole story. Overdose deaths (70,000+ in 2018 in the US), and other addiction-related deaths are probably significantly exasperated by economic crisis. I'm not arguing that the deaths from the virus won't outnumber deaths related to the quarantine, but they will be significant. They will also be much more likely to involve younger people whereas the virus is mostly killing people who are within a 10 years of reaching the average life expectancy for their country or above.

wavesounds 7y ago

If theres a silver lining to this pandemic hopefully it will make people realize the importance of having competent leaders and institutions.

Zenst 7y ago
Hypothetical question - If you had to pick a leader from anybody in the World, from the entire history of humanity to lead in such a situation - who would you pick and why?
- tatersolid 7y ago
  Eisenhower. He steered us through the greatest catastrophe the world has ever seen, and was wary of his own power.

losvedir 7y ago

Worth noting this is from last week. What's Germany's rate now? Since Germany started testing extensively and early, and death is a lagging indicator, I wouldn't be surprised if this creeps up to the more expected ~1.5% we see in Korea or the Diamond Princess. I check the worldometers numbers everyday, and already Germany is up about half a percent from when that article was written, but I'm not totally sure that site's numbers are trustworthy.

adventured 7y ago
The latest I have is 1.08%. Johns Hopkins has it at 775 deaths on 71,808 cases. Their very low mortality rate has held throughout, and they currently have a very large number of recovered patients, implying it's holding through the progression (most countries with good mortality numbers lose that as the cases get worse; you can spot this delay by the very low recovery cases as a percentage). So far among nations in Western Europe, 1.08% is extraordinary. France is at 6.6% at a similar point in recovered cases vs positive tests. And Germany is the second oldest nation at the median, behind Japan, among major nations. That mortality rate is a remarkable achievement so far.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  They are doing well enough that they confidently use their excess ICU capacity to help other countries.
- Tomte 7y ago
  > and they currently have a very large number of recovered patients And note that the real number of recovered patients is certainly higher than reported in those dashboards, because while reporting infections and deaths is mandatory, some municipalities report recoveries, others don't, and on the whole, reporting recoveries is low priority, even for those who do report them.
- Zenst 7y ago
  That also may be case of better testing and by that, more widespread. Many countries playing catch up, well they all are and may well be case that many countries with high death rates also have many untested people who had what they thought was mild cold and in some countries those mild cold's would of been tested. So it is one of those things when we won't be able to compare until down the line, and able to compare like for like.

antidaily 7y ago

Less fat people.

AlexCoventry 7y ago
FWIW, a quick Google tells me that the obesity rate in Germany is higher than it is in the US. I didn't down-vote you, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Germany I suppose it's possible that the WHO and the CDC use different BMI thresholds, though.
- fiblye 7y ago
  Germans may have a higher rate of obesity, but obese Americans seem to be more chunky than obese Germans. [1] The number of times I've seen someone who's clearly 400+ pounds outside of America has been maybe 4, 5 times? In the US, I'll see at least one or two people around that weight daily. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body_weight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body_weight
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    You seem to have left off the reference you wanted to cite with "[1]".
  - bleah1000 7y ago
    I don't think that proves anything one way or another. For example, it could mean that there are a smaller number of really obese people in America who are driving up the numbers. Therefore, there are fewer obese people in America when compared to Germany. Or it could be that your anecdote doesn't hold true. That someone who's visited Germany could say the exact same thing as you, that they always see people who are really obese.
    - fiblye 7y ago
      The link I included shows Americans being 20 pounds heavier on average.

jdkee 7y ago

testing, testing, testing

s9w 7y ago

The media should stop calling this death rate or corona deaths. These deaths are not (all) from the virus, rather occurred in people who died and had a positive test. These things can be (and I assume are) vastly different. Just as a thought experiment: The same metric would give herpes a 100% death rate.

sgc 7y ago
Influenza related death rates are estimated after the fact from several sources of data and are about 25x higher than official influenza confirmed deaths. Everybody talks about the number of influenza related deaths as the real death rate. the chance is coronavirus related deaths are also higher, not lower, than the official count.
- s9w 7y ago
  How is that possible if every death is counted as corona death? Besides a missing test of course.
  - sgc 7y ago
    There are plenty of missing tests. Testing is limited almost everywhere. Due to the testing that is in place I don't expect the same ratio, but also, not all countries count all tested deaths as corona deaths, only a few do as far as I understand.
    - s9w 7y ago
      Fair enough. From what I make of this all we do not have strong enough data to really say this is as bad as we make it. We'll see in a month or two I guess when we can conclusively look at the total mortality.
      - sgc 7y ago
        I agree we don't know yet, it could be worse or better. But I think it will take a year or two to know based on how long it takes to do a post mortem on an influenza season. Certainly failure to quarantine would be devastating so whatever the final numbers are is irrelevant. We already have overwhelmed health systems around the world, and the fatality rate would be a whole different level if that was more widespread.

_trampeltier 7y ago

I know from italy for ex. if you are tested positive on Corona, no matter how you die (a tank drove over you twice) you will end up in the "death with Corona" spreadsheet. I don't know about other countrys does this handle. Also normaly, if very old people get sick (like my grandma died) they don't go to the emergency hospital. They might go to a hospital, but usually they don't try to save lives at all costs.

splintercell 7y ago
How many Corona positive people are dying of non-Coronavirus related issues? Is that number really that much to impact the total figures?
- s9w 7y ago
  The age distribution is quite a signal that this is plausible. Then we have the Italian study that said only 1% had no other comorbidity. And then you have a few cases with enough details to go looking, usually the first death in a city/region or notable cases. As a random example this: https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/first-lehigh-county-resident-to-die-from-the-coronavirus-was-80-official-says.html https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/first-l...
  - vanniv 7y ago
    Yowza, Fellow falls hits his head, dies from head trauma -- but because he had COVID, he "succumbed to the virus" Good grief
- vanniv 7y ago
  Normally, if be tempted to say "not many, probably" but The median fatal case in Italy is an 81-year old with 2 comorbidities (typically two of: heart disease, COPD, diabetes, obesity). An 81-year-old has a ~10% chance of dying in any given year, and an 81-year-old with serious underlying medical conditions is even likelier to die. If you're an 81-year-old with serious underlying health issues, you have a material chance of death generally in a 2-month period (which the coronavirus has been there). On top of that, for those folks, every illness is a high-risk occurrence (even a simple cold). The situation in Italy now is bad enough that there are definitely many COVID deaths that wouldn't have happened without COVID. But it is almost certainly the case that a meaningful number of these patients would have died in those two months anyway. (Roughly 2% of all 80+ population would have died in that time if the virus didn't exist; it seems very likely that that 2% would be disproportionately inclusive of those with serious underlying health issues -- which are the people most killed with COVID.

jariel 7y ago

a) Not the death rate. It's just 'deaths/tested' which is something else. b) I don't see how the decentralized system entails more testing. Canada is decentralized and has more testing by the US, but it's because the respective authorities 'just did it'. The logic of 'some labs blocking others' makes no sense. If S. Korea wanted to do 'the most testing' it might be in their self-interest to 'centrally plan' thereby ensuring that it's also pointed in the right direction. c) Canada has 1/3 the per-capita cases of Germany.

omazurov 7y ago

The article could have mentioned this as well: German researchers want to send out hundreds of thousands of coronavirus-antibody tests over the coming weeks, Der Spiegel reported. People who test positive for the antibodies could be given an "immunity certificate" that would allow them to leave their coronavirus lockdown early. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, are planning mass testing to ease lockdowns. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-germany-covid-19-immunity-certificates-testing-social-distancing-lockdown-2020-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-germany-covid-19...

kanox 7y ago

This is because other countries are understating infection counts because of poor testing. Wikipedia has a very interesting table with testing stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#National_stats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#National_stat... Many countries or regions have extremely high positive test ratios, for example Lombardy is at 37% positive, France at 20% while Germany is at 7.4% and South Korea at 2.4%. If Lombardy tested more people they would find many many more cases and their reported death rate would decrease. The fact that areas with high infection counts like New York and Northern Italy are reporting high positive test ratios is terrifying. It means that they are doing worse than the numbers indicate and they're limited by testing capacity.

vanniv 7y ago

There is an aspect that is missing in this article's analysis: what counts as a COVID-caused death. In Italy, for example, all in-hospital deaths of COVID-positive patients are recorded as COVID deaths. If you're 85 years old, with emphysema, heart disease, diabetes, and COVID, and you die of acute respiratory distress... did COVID kill you? In Italy, it did, 100% In New York, it is up to the doctor who declares you dead, but it probably did. In Germany, it most likely didn't. That is not to say that Germany isn't doing a good job -- they are. They are doing a lot of testing, isolating, and contact tracing. They are also going full-speed-ahead with the experimental hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin treatment, offering it everyone without contraindications, starting almost from the beginning of the outbreak. Both of those things contribute to the low death rate. They are also detecting a higher percentage of cases, which automatically lowers the apparent mortality (since every country detects most of the hospitalizations, more testing means finding more inherently non-lethal cases, meaning more detected recoveries)

s9w 7y ago
In Germany too. Every death plus Positive sars-cov-2 test == death "from" corona

IXxXI 7y ago

Germany's numbers are as accurate as china's.