Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

baxtr·

I really wonder what the difference between these countries is:

- Germany: 15,320 cases / 44 deaths

- France: 10,947 cases / 243 deaths

- Spain: 17,963 cases / 830 deaths

View on HN

There are various discussions and theories especially as to the low death rates in Germany. Germany has had distributed testing capabilities very early (end of January) and has performed a large amount of testing compared to other European countries, which means cases are cought early and not when they hit the ICU. Other theories are the large amount of ICU beds, local medical production facilities, still ongoing contact tracing and some other things. The expectation however is that the death rate will go up a fair bit.

Also - different reporting strategies. Germany is not always reporting someone as a CV death if the dominating factor was something else, whereas Italy reports them all as CV deaths. Or at least that's a widespread theory I've seen. It's hard to imagine such a huge difference can be down purely to testing.

I think the next days will see people dig into these stats and start a more complex discussion about what exactly it means to die of this virus, what exactly capacity means in a world where doctors can go to enormous lengths to save every life in quiet times but can't in crisis times. Just comparing raw numbers doesn't tell us the whole story.

You even see it among states in the US:

- New York: 4152 cases / 29 deaths

- Washington: 1228 cases / 75 deaths

In this case at least it appears that in Washington there was a connected set of old age homes that got hit pretty early before more preventative steps were being taken -- https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-18/corona...

Age of the infected population?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com