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.
It's ranked as number one in stringency of response - they explicitly say it's not to be interpreted as a rating of the appropriateness or effectiveness of a country's response.
> Croatia also does well. Croatia has both land and maritime borders (also ferries running back and forth) with Italy.
I have a friend that lives in Zagreb, and after the earthquake that damaged the town she said an alarming amount of People were outdoors, and were unprotected as they were worried about aftershocks and tremors and just left their homes.
So she went to the countryside with her family, she said she was super lucky because right after she left they closed down all public transportation and issued a mandated lockdown.
Croatia is a really small country with a small population so its far more manageable to contain then the US or China, it also has a high elderly population who are most vulnerable: I spent a lot of time there, and in the South its common to be in a town where the average age is 70+ with them filling as the primary child care takers as the parents are in major cities working or often in other parts of the EU.
So its interesting how the containment measures play out as it has really dire consequences.
Economically speaking, they're screwed if this goes on: its mainly a tourism based economy with little else, they're active like 7 months out of the year in order to survive the other 5 as it comes to a stall.
Germany's curve is way better looking than ours though. Eventually it's very likely that Germany will settle at a lower population-adjusted fatality rate than the U.S. But it's not going to look at good as their raw CFR would indicate.
Death rate also has a lot of caveats. In the Netherlands for example (due to the euthanasia culture? or just NO CODE?) people highly at risk (everyone - even without symptoms or testing positive) are encouraged to think about whether they would even want to be ventilated (and take up valuable resources, spending weeks in coma and have decreased quality of life afterwards). Lots of people don't go to ICUs - only 10% of the deaths happened in an ICU.
In totaal zijn 1200 patiënten opgenomen geweest op de intensive care, van wie er 140 zijn overleden. 19 IC-patiënten zijn uit het ziekenhuis ontslagen, meldt Gommers.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, the impact thru cause and effect is always bigger and will play out in many ways and forms for a while, even once things settle down on the surface, that impact will ripple on for some time.
There is a incredible difference between "I'm taking a month off of work" and "I'm being forced to stay in my home, physically isolated from my friends and forced to be around those I share a home with 24/7, with the possibility of financial hardship in the near or far term."
I don't agree with the initial premise that suppression measures would potentially cost anywhere near as many lives as they would save. That said, I don't think it's reasonable to compare being off work due to a pandemic lockdown or similar circumstances to a month-long vacation. This will cause significant hardship and stress for many people. It's just that without measures to control the virus, you would still have those effects; they would just come due to fear after a bunch of people die, rather than intentional efforts.
> There's just no plausible way that a recession following this pandemic will kill more folks than the pandemic itself will, not even close.
You're unfortunately very far off in that claim about risk as it pertains to economy. Suicides are a small component of economic risk factors.
For example, if you miscalculate what you're doing in India in managing people and the functioning of the economy through this, you could cause famine and kill millions of people.
A story from Bloomberg covering the food supply deprivation beginning in India:
> ‘We Will Starve Here’: India’s Poor Flee Cities in Mass Exodus
Put together the suicides (which could be worse this time with so many people trapped at home), domestic abuse, drug addiction, and worldwide starvation, and it adds up to a lot of lives. That’s just what I’m halfway confident about so far.
I'm saying that you need to look at both points of data. Imagine you have two countries with 10 million people each. Country A has 50,000 deaths and country B has 55,000 deaths due to the virus. Just looking at this measure, the conclusion is that country A dealt with the crisis better. However, it could be that the measures taken in country A caused more problems for the economy, ultimately leading to the deaths of 10,000 people, while country B's economy recovered swiftly with almost no deaths resulting from it.
In this example country B ultimately had the better outcome, despite having more deaths directly due to the virus.
Four times as many people have already died from COVID-19
Died with SARS-CoV-2, not because of it. As far as I know died "because of" isn't tracked or published by any country. And "died with" doesn't mean much (anything?) because coronaviruses of all kinds are so frequently co-present in natural deaths of old age anyway.
For example in 2006 there was what appeared to be an outbreak of SARS in an old people's home in Canada:
It turned out to be false positives on the kits and the real coronavirus was a fairly ordinary strain. Nonetheless the measured death rate was 5%.
When you see things like this it becomes apparent how carefully statistics like death rate must be used (or not used). We have literally no solid data in this epidemic. Every piece of evidence, every anecdote turns out on investigation to have enormous caveats or be misleading.
According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die per day due to poverty. That's over 8 million per year. And that's just children while poverty has been the lowest it has ever been. What do you think is going to happen in developing countries in the next few years? Absolute mortality will likely be around 1% or less once you take into account all those that are asymptomatic and much of this 1% would die in the next decade due to old age and co-morbidities.
If poverty doubles (very probable) and the number of children dying dies as a result, it will take 9.5 years just to reach the death toll in children alone. Once you factor adults as well, I wouldn't be surprised if the economic fallout causes more deaths than this flu in less than 5 years.
These countries will also never catch up to where they otherwise would have been, so the additional incremental deaths due to the economic fallout will persist in perpetuity.
It seems like you are assuming a much larger asymptomatic rate than what has been published. Because population fatality rate without healthcare would probably be in the 3-7% range, and true asymptomatic cases are only around 20% (at least based on Diamond Princess data). There are around 1.2 billion people in Africa, yielding a death toll on that continent around 36M souls at the low end. Four years of childhood poverty-related deaths.
Even without any public health intervention, a death toll like this would spark a major recession most folks withdrew from economic activity out of fear. Even if you ignored it at the governmental level, it would quickly be impossible to ignore at the social level. Pretending that we can just push through that many deaths is a fantasy.
I doubt your prediction of a doubling of extreme poverty would come to pass. The folks we're talking about are already in many cases living at a subsistence level. They are not depending on an export economy to keep their households fed. But even supposing it does, it would take four years of that to make up for the losses due to unchecked COVID-19, and that's assuming that such a scenario caused no economic setbacks, which is just not plausible.
Anyway, none of that is going to happen. No political regime would survive sitting idly by as 2-3% of the population expires. So lockdown and public health intervention will ultimately be the order of the day everywhere. The theory that any other approach would do better will not be tested.
Let’s argue about hypotheticals in a few months when we have more perspective. Both of your lines of reasoning are filament-thin and stitched together using way too many assumptions right now.
I noticed you were claiming that the Sars Cov 2 pandemic was starting to wind down a week ago. But as of today the situation is much more explosive than it was when you made that claim, basically everywhere except Italy, which is on full lockdown. In much of the world there is every indication that the bad is only accelerating. Do you think that maybe it's your predictions and lines of reasoning that are actually miscalibrated?
In the US the deaths are accelerating, but they lag by many weeks or even months in some cases. Lots of new cases are being identified with the increase in testing, but the proportion of positive tests is not changing, which is evidence that the spread is well past the "explosive" point. But each community follows its own mini-epidemic, and there's still tons of uncertainty. We will see how good of a prediction it was eventually.
This lockdown has already guaranteed many more deaths due to poverty.
Every day it continues, more are added.
But, there is no up-to-the-minute tracker with bright red body counts. There are no stacks of coffins. There are no sob stories.
Because the people who will die because of the lockdown might not die for years yet. A family that was doing OK, now both parents have lost their jobs, one will remain unemployed for years. The family becomes poor, eats lower-quality food for the next 20+ years.
Kids that would have been healthy now get diabetes in their 30s, heart disease in their 40s, and ultimately die of heart attacks in their early 50s, who otherwise would have loved to 80.
Or, kid that used to have a healthy home environment now does not. Gets involved in gangs and drugs. Overdoses at 26. Or is killed in gang violence. Or ends up in prison. It takes three generations for that family to recover.
Millions of families that were not on this path a month ago are now five steps down it -- and every day, some unknowable number of these tragedies goes from possible to probable, or from probable to all-but-unavoidable.
But in virtually all of the cases, even after the fact, you'll never be able to prove that it wouldn't have happened but for the lockdowns.
So, we get to pretend the number is zero, instead of unknowable masses.
My fear is that entire sectors of the economy are all shut down at the same time. Many of those businesses will never open their doors again. A lot of institutional knowledge and expertise will be lost.
> Just look at say Japan after the tsunami which not only killed people but also destroyed a lot of critical infrastructure.
Ok, lets; because I think the one positive thing that may come out of all of this is that we act with an acute understanding that our current system on this Planet is precarious, unsustainable, and we cannot just go back to it.
Which is what Japan did, and continues to do: they have not addressed the massive out-pour of Nuclear run-off into the Pacific, they have neglected to address the massive displaced population of Fukushima, their contamination programs are insufficient and the testing for their food is still not wide-spread nor taken seriously. They haven't completely phased out Nuclear Energy after all of this, and continue with a political lobbyist perspective whether they will or won't turn them back on.
All while still trying to continue to get the Olympic games to take place; no, I'd say Japan's Government reaction is exactly what we shouldn't be following, its exactly what we need to avoid in order to ensure this doesn't take place.
Wet-Markets re-emerging in China, for example, would be following Japan: simply continuing something because it served some economic function, but carried large consequences and still doing it anyway is not what we should strive for. Those Wet-Markets are thought to be significant contributors to SARS and now CoVid19.
If anything risk-management needs to be a bigger contributor to how we act moving forward; as I see ME and Russia oil refiners play chicken with one another, I wonder if this is what will what finally transitions us to EV in earnest. Continuing to rely on such suicidal actors to carry out best practices for something so critical has to be seen for the folly that it is.
I'm admittedly a petrolhead, but a part of me always knew this was coming and I fully embraced it occurring, I just wished we would have had the good sense for it to be a gradual transition--as it was appearing to be with many Manufactures pushing for EV models being a large part of their lineup based on purchases and legislation requirements--rather than an abrupt shock to the system that made us realize where our priorities should be when thinking about sustainable mass-transport.
The same sentiment goes for things like how UBI, Work From Home and Online Learning being the way many jobs and schools function in order to reduce Greenhouse emissions and help curb climate change. This can be an opportunity in disguise if we have the foresight to see it as one and act as a Planetary Species understanding that our very survival is at stake rather than the petulant children and a voracious appetite for 'what we want, at all costs,' as we've been thus far.
> Economies are surprisingly resilient.
I want to believe in anti-fragile economic models, too; but I've come to the realization that however persuasive intellectually as that argument may be it isn't absolute when the very Environment you're operating in cannot carry on with the practices that make that doctrine possible at scale.
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.
I don't think this would have a large impact because the percentage of people who have coronovirus is still extremely low, 0.1% in the worst hit countries.
Normal european death rates seem to be ~10 death/1000 people/year; for example in 2018 Germany had 954874 deaths or ~2600 per day. Multiply that with a ~0.1% coronavirus rate and only 2 people who would have died anyway would get overcounted for coronavirus.
We simply don't have random testing in Germany yet. 0.1% is roughly the official number of positive test (of people who are sick enough to get tested).
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-l...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If you think or raise so, then you're measuring wrong; and to me, it feels everybody is measuring death rates wrong.
Let me elaborate. Let's say you're a teacher and you do a "test-type" exam (the true/false ones whose score you can verify with a machine, real quick) to 100 students. If after 30minutes of ongoing examination, 10 students have finished already, and let's say you check how many have passed: 9. The way the world is measuring, as an analogy, is saying that the "fail rate" of the exam is 1%, while it's actually "10% so far". When you measure success/failure, you have to take in account only people that finished.
Therefore it's crucial to compare recovered vs death cases, and not take the "current cases" into account.
Still, if we correct the death rates numbers to use this method, it'll be not accurate, because there are many cases which are untested and therefore many recoveries that are not taken in account (although some deaths too).
What are you talking about? Ever since the first big Munich cohort, Germany has done extensive testing and scientists like Dr. Drosten have confirmed multiple times that we've been testing from a very early point on and are probably closer to the number of actual infections than many of our neighboring countries.
Mask shortage is a global problem and will remain so for some time since we'll have to limit making them available to where they are actually needed (hospitals, doctors, nursing homes).
All in all, I think Germany has dealt with SARS-CoV-2 in a responsible way, and the numbers so far seem to agree.
Objectively speaking from outside Germany, Germany's response has been far better than that of other large EU countries (UK, France, Spain, Italy). Germany has done contact tracing and testing, Germany has done (and is doing) 3-10x as many tests per capita per day than most other countries, Germany has been rigorously enforcing quarantines as opposed to say the UK, which has not enforced them at all.
Yes, no mandatory masks, no temperature measurements of key workers -- it is still far worse than Korea or Taiwan -- but don't kid yourself, Merkel and her advisors have been far more competent here than Johnson, Macron let alone US authorities.
I do not know where you got this bullshit from; as someone living here, it makes me wonder, how anybody could call the Merkel Passiveness to "having startet extensively"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't follow along with that. We're in peace times.. banning people from going out of their home is something I would not have believed possible until russian tanks are at the gates of Berlin again, or the day of reckoning is coming after all.
The mortality is not increased [1], the number of acute respiratory illnesses is not increased [2]. German hospitals are not overwhelmed, indeed we gave away hundreds of respirators and treat a large number of patients from neighboring countries right now.
There are single cases of overwhelmed medical systems, but those are few and in places where this has happened before [3] and frankly those places have not been in great shape before.
I can't see the justification for these draconian measures with so little evidence. What I do see however is a perverse dynamic between sensationalist media and power hungry politicians. It's infuriating how critics are defamed by newspapers [4] and even high-profile experts ignored [5]. The economic and social downfall from these measures will be insurmountable I fear and dwarf any risk now or even in the foreseeable future from sars-cov-2.
I would not be surprised if fatalities overall remain flat due to lowered activity. That doesn't mean they would not explode without them. Germany is an outlier, not the norm as basically all statistics we have at this point indicate. I agree that Germany needs a different course of action than other countries, but I don't think that is widely applicable.
Milan was not overwhelmed by influenza, that is just an Italian title, which is full of energy/exaggeration as usual. The article talks of 48 cases, which is a far cry from the 40,000+ they have in that region now.
Frankly, anybody peddling that a crushing blow to the world economy is conspiracy to get a little more funding for one sector should be discredited whoever they are. That is ludicrous. There is far to much avarice in too many competing sectors, just for starters. And scientists are not that cutthroat as a group.
I think you misinterpret the last link you posted. He does not advocate for doing nothing, but for quickly gathering data and changing our tactics as new information comes in, since there are risks both in quarantine and in not quarantining. I think everyone agrees with this and it is actually what all countries are doing. Even Italy is reevaluating their quarantine measures weekly, etc.
I do agree with you that the economic risk is enormous, and I am unconvinced that my business will exist when I can work again. But at the same time there is nothing to say what we did in the face of illness before this quarantine was human or correct. I think we are too callous about "normal" annual deaths from other causes and if anything comes from this massive effort, I hope it is an awareness of these other causes of death and funding and concrete action going towards them. It's no conspiracy to recognize that investing in better health of the population by effective, concrete steps to guarantee and promote diet, exercise, etc would be a worthwhile item to invest far more resources to than we currently do.
> I would not be surprised if fatalities overall remain flat
What would be enough evidence in a month or two that you would agree that this was fantastically overblown? I fear that even after this is over, the numbers will be be same same but still misrepresented by everyone to say that it was all necessary.
I doubt that would be possible in that time frame. But I would need to see evidence of basic herd immunity or a massive chunk of herd immunity (50% population including representative percentage of the elderly) with low death rates, including in areas where medical systems were overwhelmed. Otherwise an effective preventative quarantine will always on face value look like an exaggeration, since the goal is to avoid something before it happens. But looking at New York and Milan, etc, I think that option is fast becoming a fantasy if it is not one already.
Solidarity and group effort are important parts of what it means to be human.
Maybe we should be infecting under 40s with a very low dose of the virus so they have an ever higher probability of getting just a little sick, and jump start the herd immunity process. It would be a form of vaccine-lite and allow a lot of people to get back to a normal life sooner rather than later.
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.
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.
> 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.
Is it better? I really don’t know, all I heard about this are the complaints about rural areas being underserved by doctors, especially GPs
They're sometimes maybe not quite up to the standards you'd find in a urban university clinic, but compared to other places I've been it's quite astonishing how high quality the care is even in small remote hospitals. The demographics are increasingly affecting the number of physicians though, that much is true.
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.
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.
The important claim in the article is that Germany started testing early and on a large scale. That can happen either top down or when disparate authorities agree to coordinate their response.
It's also worth noting that in the 5 days since that article, the number of deaths in Germany appears to have quadrupled. There's also:
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.
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"?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.