
Covid Germany Anomaly, Why? - boonez123
Why does Germany have such a low number of serious&#x2F;critical covid patients? The last number I saw was 23 which is nuts compared to a country such as Spain with a similar case count. Water, beer, schnitzel? What’s the magic there?
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eduma
German resident (md) here. The ‘official’ explanation is that Germany did lot
of testing early in the course of the epidemic. We have many cases in the
healthy population resulting in less severe symptoms. The older population is
still not so much affected. A significant rise in death-counts is expected in
the next two weeks. Hospitals are planing for the worst. Stay safe!

~~~
nocorpwelfare
I keep seeing that "next couple of weeks" phenomenon. At what point can we be
assured that we crossed those ever-critical couple of weeks? It keeps pushing
out.

I am thinking that Corona is killing the same people who would have died from
regular flu for the most part, i.e. it's not in addition to normal deaths. I
understand that this is a minority opinion, but data may bear it out
eventually.

~~~
sloaken
Look at the 'worldometers' that someone else posted. You will see sloping
lines there. You can judge for yourself when it has actually hit.

Because of a lack of ICU facilities, governments are hoping to push the
critical point out as far as possible.

~~~
zabana
except virus != ill != death

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syllogism
The cases and deaths counts aren't informative enough to really say anything
useful about what's going on. When a "case" is reported, we don't when the
symptoms started occurring, or even when the original sample was collected. So
you can't really draw any conclusions from this "consumer grade" information.
You'd have to study it properly, and look a sample of individual case
progressions.

I think the CFR stat is especially misleading, and we shouldn't be trying to
compare it. For instance, if a country simply has a longer lag between testing
and reporting the tests, the CFR will look higher. CFR will also look lower if
the growth rate is high.

I made a little hypothetical to illustrate this.

Imagine a disease where your skin turns bright green on day 8 and you drop
dead on day 30, without fail for all infections. It's growing 25% a day.
What's the "CFR" at day 100?

In this hypothetical, all infections are symptomatic, all symptomatic cases
are detected, and all symptomatic cases are fatal. But people don't drop dead
immediately -- it takes 22 days, and at 25% a day the number of cases grows
135x in that period.

So even though this fictional disease is 100% fatal, the "case fatality ratio"
will stay under 1% all the way through the growth phase.

In summary: those stats aren't really evidence that Germany's outbreak is
progressing any differently from anyone else's. The information is much too
vague to say one way or another. Instead the baseline assumption is, Germany
has the same virus as everywhere else, and is applying the same treatments. So
for any individual patients, the outlooks will be the same here as anywhere
else that still has ICU beds and ventilators available.

------
_red
From what I understand, countries like Germany are only reporting deaths with
no co-morbidity, whereas Italy anyone that was positive with Covid19 in their
system and dies is being reported as a death.

The lack of standardized reporting is odd considering the impacts. It
definitely seems to be contributing to the general confusion on decision
making.

~~~
giardini
So the Italian numbers are inflated (do we know how much?) and the Germany
numbers are more accurate?

~~~
jaclaz
Hard to say, but the issue (the one OP talked about) is BEFORE counting
deaths.

Right now the same source (for Germany):

[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/)

Has 23 "Serious or critical" people out of 41,324 cases (and the remaining
41,301 are in "Mild condition").

In Italy:

[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/)

3,612 critical out of 62,013 total (6%).

In Spain:

[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/)

3,166 critical out of 46,406 total (7%).

In France (seemingly much worse than Italy or Spain):

[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/)

3,375 critical out of 22,511 total (15%).

Now France's anomaly (compared to Italy and Spain) could be an undercounting
(by 2x) of total cases, but the anomaly in Germany could only be explained if
the actual number of cases in Spain and Italy are undercounted by 100x!

There must be _something else_.

~~~
nocorpwelfare
No, you have arrived at the answer.

The counts are wrong by orders of magnitude.

Now follow through with what that means.

