Hacker News Reader

Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com