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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

They are doing well enough that they confidently use their excess ICU capacity to help other countries.

> and death is a lagging indicator,

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).

>> Since Germany started testing extensivel

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"

???

Source, please.

Read the wikipedia article and be less agressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#National_stat...

Note that the German numbers are a week out of date compared to other countries and Germany has been doing 200,000 tests in addition last week.

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