I think what is going on is a combination of relatively good testing capacity from the beginning and mostly young people infected, which due to the testing were prevented from spreading it to older demographics. See https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/478220a4c454480e823...

Also there is the purely anecdotal hypothesis of a cultural difference between for example Italy, Spain and Germany. In the southern countries it seems like older people have quite an active social life compared to Germany.

There are also far more old people living with young people in Italy and Spain than in Germany.

We could possibly clean up the numbers, assuming the death rate is predictable across regions.

Take numbers from a region where testing is frequent, say the death rate is 2%. Then scale the numbers in a region with lack of testing to match the 2% death rate.

Not perfect, as there are external factors like hospital capacity/quality and existing population health.

However, it should give a closer approximation of total cases where politicians fail to provide adequate testing.

Well unfortunately US has much higher rate of obesity, diabetes and other factors that will increase mortality so would be pretty hard.

China has a much higher rate of smokers, poor air quality, and existing respiratory disease.

Do you have any statistics pointing to obesity as an increased risk factor for a respritory disease?

High Blood pressure was a big factor from what I read. There is very strong correlation between obesity and hypertension.

Each country has it's own date for when "testing came online", and it seems like starting from then might make things more comparable, despite differences in testing capacity and strategy. Another approach might be to on start looking at the data after the number of cases is > 100.

Stop repeating German propaganda :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M4kbPDHGR0&feature=youtu.be... turn on google auto translate

TLDR: Any comorbidities present at the time of death are reported as the main culprit. In other news https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736(20)3... Table 2: Treatments and outcomes. Sepsis 100%, Respiratory failure 98%. There you go, nobody dies from the virus alone, problem solved, 20x less deaths than comparable Spain.

Then why are basically all Corona deaths in Germany reported as having other illnesses too? If this claim were true, none of these deaths of sick old people would have been reported as being due to Corona. Do you have any evidence this is more than speculation (at least the english translation also makes it sound like it is worded speculation, not a claim of fact), and that someone who was known to be infected and died was not reported?

I keep asking people about this because I'd for sure would like to know if it were happening, but the only two sources I've seen sounded like speculation by Italian officials that at least as absolute as it is reported in other languages does not match the actual reporting here as far as I can tell.

It is the health care system like number of ICUs, training of doctors and stuff like not being able to get antibiotics simply over the counter like in Italy. If my memory serves me right e.g. in Italy 29% have a resistance to antibiotics, in Germany only 0.4%.

People don't become resistant to antibiotics, bacteria do and resistant bacteria in Italy would just spread to Germany. Anyway Covid-19 is a virus, not a bacterium.

While its true SARS-CoV-2 is a virus, opportunistic bacterial pneumonia is a secondary complication of Covid19 which increases its lethality. So you need decent antibiotics too.

..and it's nasty, my wife only just recovered from it a week ago after a total of 8 weeks in bed.