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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

So far the median age of German cases is 47. It is 63 for Italy. Also, Germany isn’t doing postmortem testing on people that are dying from preexisting conditions that could be suspicious. Italy has tested corpses that weren’t initially tested.

Global numbers are so tough to compare with different countries testing differently, reporting differently, and of course demographic differences.

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To put those case figures in context; the median age of the population as a whole in Germany is 47, and for Italy it's 45. [1]

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/median-age/

Italy doesn't test people that die outside of the hospitals either.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...

The OP is not talking about people dying outside hospitals, it saying that people with dying with preexisting conditions are not tested

Very true. Each country is following also different policies. I personally know a few people that are infected in Spain but have not been officially tested so they don't make part of any statistic.

If they have not been officially tested, how do you know they are infected? It's not enough to have symptoms; I myself had several symptoms about a month ago, but they didn't test me because they were not enough symptoms and I didn't have a travel history to mainland China, so then I still don't know if I was actually infected or it was just a flu.

It is what the doctors told them. Also considering they have been in direct contact with officially tested infected people. Young people with very hard breathing difficulties (for the first time in their life), fever, muscular and bone pain, etc. Btw, the doctors call them at least once a day but they are confined at home.

The differentiating question might be did you have a running nose? If yes, it's not the coronavirus.

WHO says "very few" people will get a running nose, but that is not equivalent to saying you do not have the virus if you have a running nose. I'd be careful saying blanket statements like this

Why do they test people who are dead already? Given the shortage of tests, wouldn't it more sense to test people who are alive?

Dying patients are still in contact with tons of people: doctors, nurses, relatives, etc; and these people go on infecting, unless they are traced and isolated. One case in Southern Italy resulted in death, but the body was incorrectly released for the funeral like a regular case. Result: dozens of infections at the funeral.

One person in a nursing home of now 20 dies of respiratory complications matching pre-existing conditions.

You can:

- assume it was coronavirus, test the remaining 20 people - cost: 20 tests

- or, test the dead person, then only test the remaining 20 people if that test comes back positive - cost: 1 test or 21 tests, expected cost 1 + 20 * % chance the person was infected tests.

Unless you believe there's a 95% chance they were infected, the tests are better spent elsewhere.

(This assumes you are also going to isolate them until the results are in regardless, which has further cost and dangers especially in high-risk groups. And that you are either already testing or not testing anyone outside the living group possibly exposed. Public health is a wicked problem.)

To trace contacts of the deceased person. For an elder person, it's likely he/she has interacted with other elders, and it's good to check.

Compared with testing a healthy young person who is asymptomatic, it's better to test the dead one.

Edit: but healthy people with some suspect symptoms should of course remain isolated.

1. You can still do contact tracing of a dead person, and follow-up on who they interacted with.

2. Bigger death numbers allow medical professionals to go to their government, and demand for more stringent quarantine measures.

Different places in the world have different levels of test shortage.

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