The UK has done around 110k tests, Germany more than 400k. Don't confuse positive test results with actual infections. If the UK tested more, it'd very likely have more "cases".
With that, who really thinks Russia has so few cases compared to the rest of the countries?
Even deaths, which you would of thought would be pretty clear cut, some countries will not count deaths with underlying conditions when many do. Then you have those who died at home and nobody knows about it.
I do know one thing, I feel for the postal workers in months ahead as there job will become a lot more morbid seeing who's letterbox is rammed and with that, possible dead people inside that nobody knows and for those postal workers - they will be the ones raising the alarms.
I don't, I'm mostly going by deaths/1M pop, and afaik even if the UK tested more, that number wouldn't change and still be more than double that of Germany.
So Germany must do something right that the UK doesn't.
Maybe it's the extra ICU beds, maybe it's the rapid testing, most likely it's a combination of both of those in addition to the better funding?
... or wrong. Italy e.g. tests dead people for Coronavirus, Germany might conclude in many cases that people with prior issues died from those issues. I know Austria is very reluctant about this.
Another poster mentioned the decentralised nature of the German system, that has been mentioned as one of the reasons why Germany was able to test so much.
It's over 400k total as of March 23rd and 100k in the week of 20th. https://www.zeit.de/wissen/gesundheit/2020-03/coronatests-de...
> Another poster mentioned the decentralised nature of the German system, that has been mentioned as one of the reasons why Germany was able to test so much.*
Seems to be, but that makes Austria's excuses look a bit poor. Here they have a similar decentralised system, but they're claiming that they don't get enough test kits on the market and that's why they're now testing 3k-5k a day despite having lab capacities >15k/day. If Germany can get them, Austria can, too - money shouldn't be an issue.
I feel like that question is asked the wrong way around because you are assuming England has "exactly enough", that's how you end up with Germany supposedly "running five times more beds than it needs".
But there's good reason to believe England has not enough ICU beds, even outside of a pandemic, the result of years of austerity cuts to the NHS [0].
There's also the fact that Germany is a healthcare powerhouse. Often forgotten among all the "cars and engineering" exports, but pharma and vaccines are the other two German top exports [1]
These are fields you can only really innovate in if you have a matching clinical and medical infrastructure behind it, which Germany has.
It's this combination that allows Germany to have such low fatality rates [2]. To put them in numbers: The UK right now sits at 11 deaths per 1m population, Germany at 5, and that's with Germany having tens of thousands of more cases [3].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/01/perfect-sto...
[1] https://oec.world/en/profile/country/deu/
[2] https://apnews.com/ad9a6af47c3b55fd83080c9168afaaf4
[3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries