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Do you have a link for this 500,000 tests per day? Every article I am reading says they only started ramping up testing in the past few weeks. > And the total

Do you have a link for this 500,000 tests per day? Every article I am reading says they only started ramping up testing in the past few weeks. > And the total number of swab tests done by 4 April was well over 1.3 million. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52234061 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52234061 The population of Germany is 83 million. I find it hard to believe that they've tested more than 5 million or so people in 10 days.

gwd 7y ago
So I did mangle my numbers somewhat, thanks for checking. As of April 5th they'd done 1.3 million tests, found 95k cases, and had 1.4k deaths [1]. Presumably there are at least some people tested multiple times; so those 1.3 million tests don't represent 1.3 million people. The only way to get the "die with the best medical care" number below 0.1% is if you have a million untested people who are sick. If I was a proper statistician, with those numbers I could probably come up with models or estimates of how many possibly untested people there might be in Germany. My instinct is that number can't be millions, because at least some of those millions would be sick enough to go to the hospital, and then all of their connections would be tested and be found out. But even then, what we really need is the "would have died without medical care" number, which is what the number would look like if we did a "fast burn" and let everyone get sick at once. For that number to be less than 1% (which would still be pretty dire), we need closer to 2 million unknown cases. I just don't see how 2 million positive cases can hide from the kind of testing Germany is doing. The same goes for Korea. [1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200406-sitrep-77-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=21d1e632_2 https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

gwd 7y ago

So I did mangle my numbers somewhat, thanks for checking. As of April 5th they'd done 1.3 million tests, found 95k cases, and had 1.4k deaths [1]. Presumably there are at least some people tested multiple times; so those 1.3 million tests don't represent 1.3 million people. The only way to get the "die with the best medical care" number below 0.1% is if you have a million untested people who are sick. If I was a proper statistician, with those numbers I could probably come up with models or estimates of how many possibly untested people there might be in Germany. My instinct is that number can't be millions, because at least some of those millions would be sick enough to go to the hospital, and then all of their connections would be tested and be found out. But even then, what we really need is the "would have died without medical care" number, which is what the number would look like if we did a "fast burn" and let everyone get sick at once. For that number to be less than 1% (which would still be pretty dire), we need closer to 2 million unknown cases. I just don't see how 2 million positive cases can hide from the kind of testing Germany is doing. The same goes for Korea. [1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200406-sitrep-77-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=21d1e632_2 https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...