Covid Germany Anomaly, Why? | Hacker News Reader

Covid Germany Anomaly, Why?

3 pointsboonez12314 comments

Why does Germany have such a low number of serious/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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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!

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.

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.

except virus != ill != death

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/27/us-coronavirus-cases-top-100...

Someone made a comparison of the number of deaths in one of severly affected Italian cities over the past couple of weeks vs an equivalent period there in 2019. The death count was something like 78 vs 18.

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.

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.

I don’t think so, have a look at the official guidelines for reporting Covid-19 cases (in German):

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

Basically every patient that shows symptoms of pneumonia gets tested for Covid-19 now, as well as all persons that were in direct contact with such a patient. Currently about 360,000 tests are done per week in Germany, next week more than 500,000 are projected. No country in the world tests more people per capital currently, so I really don’t think the numbers are underreported.

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

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/

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/

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

In 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/

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.

No, you have arrived at the answer.

The counts are wrong by orders of magnitude.

Now follow through with what that means.

I am not so sure I would say that.

If Germany is not reporting a death if a person has high blood pressure, then I think theirs are under. The death rate from numbers I had seen were like 10x more fatal if you have some other issue.

IMHO Italy is more accurate, because it could be said that the deaths would not have occurred, yet, without Covid.

Other explanation, per an email from a German relative: Germany is probably the only country in the EU where following the WHO recommendation of 1m distancing will bring people closer together'

FWIW, media reports of deaths in Germany quite often reported that the deceased had other illnesses too, so I'm skeptical of all the blanket claims that Germany isn't reporting deaths that have other causes too.

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