This does not make any sense. North Italy health care is at least as good as the one in Germany and surely better than the one in Switzerland. Probably these countries are sampling a lot the general population finding many people with mild or no symptoms. In Italy because of the size of the problem the ones getting sampled are now almost solely severe cases.

Take a look at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries, specifically the total deaths and total recovered.

If I take Td / (Td + Tr), I get:

China: 0.05

Italy: 0.44

Iran: 0.14

South Korea: 0.08

Germany: 0.19 (Germany's numbers for both are so low I don't believe this is useful.)

What's up with that?

1. The population of infected people in Italy for some reason include an incredible amount of old people. If you see the aggregates VS South Corea, they have a lot of young people infected. So you get more fatalities per people infected. (Italy population, together with the one in Japan, is the oldest of the world, but this yet does not explain the difference, it's like if the cluster here originated from people at a certain age and also due to sociality patterns of old people here, or more likely, see "2" below).

2. Italy, because of the size of the epidemic event we are facing, is sampling only people that go to the hospital in serious conditions. Other countries are sampling the more general population, finding a lot of positive cases with mild symptoms or asymptomatic at all. So there is a selection bias.

3. It also depends on the way you count people. In Italy we are counting as a COVID19 victim even people severely ill that once dead are positive for the virus.

TLDR: you can't compare such numbers.

How is it “good” when they’re turning away >80 year olds?

Because "good" doesn't mean "infinite capacity", and the sheer number of COVID cases needing IC beds will overtake the number of IC beds in the country if the growth is not checked fast and early.

No one is getting out with a death rate that low. SK is nearing 1%.

The numbers are only so low in Germany/Switzerland because its a) growing fast and b) they are testing aggressively. More precisely (and morbidly), the death rate is low because not enough time has passed yet.

You proved my point. Aggressive testing will plump up the denominator. Deaths cannot escape so the numerator is accurate.

In Germany and Switzerland if all the serious cases are deaths then the death rate is 0.1-0.5%.

People do not die instantaneously when they are infected. There is potentially a multi-week lag between people showing up in the confirmed cases number and people showing up in the deaths number.

Two weeks ago, Germany had ~100 cases. Today, Germany has 11 deaths.

Germany has a total of 57 cases with outcomes (46 of 57 recovered).

South Korea has ~900 cases with outcomes (~75 dead). China has ~70k cases with outcomes (~3k dead).

Let's wait a few weeks before reaching conclusions about the mortality rate in Germany and using that as evidence to prove covid-19 is just a mild flu.

Deaths / cases with outcomes is an overestimate (19% for Germany). Deaths / total cases is an underestimate (0.2% for Germany). Somewhere in between is the true mortality rate.

CFR isn't a number, it's a function. it has a discontinuity at the point where hospitalized case count becomes greater than available hospital bed count.