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Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by losvedir on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:20PM (#22745305)
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.

Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by adventured on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:26PM (#22745343)
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.

Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by Zenst on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @12:11AM (#22745581)
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.

Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by Tomte on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:52PM (#22745473)
> 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.

Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by jacquesm on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:47PM (#22745441)
They are doing well enough that they confidently use their excess ICU capacity to help other countries.
Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by knocte on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:53PM (#22745477)
> 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).

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Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by Schaulustiger on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @06:42AM (#22747368)
What are you talking about? Ever since the first big Munich cohort, Germany has done extensive testing and scientists like Dr. Drosten have confirmed multiple times that we've been testing from a very early point on and are probably closer to the number of actual infections than many of our neighboring countries.

Mask shortage is a global problem and will remain so for some time since we'll have to limit making them available to where they are actually needed (hospitals, doctors, nursing homes).

All in all, I think Germany has dealt with SARS-CoV-2 in a responsible way, and the numbers so far seem to agree.

Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by MagnumOpus on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @05:56AM (#22747156)
Objectively speaking from outside Germany, Germany's response has been far better than that of other large EU countries (UK, France, Spain, Italy). Germany has done contact tracing and testing, Germany has done (and is doing) 3-10x as many tests per capita per day than most other countries, Germany has been rigorously enforcing quarantines as opposed to say the UK, which has not enforced them at all.

Yes, no mandatory masks, no temperature measurements of key workers -- it is still far worse than Korea or Taiwan -- but don't kid yourself, Merkel and her advisors have been far more competent here than Johnson, Macron let alone US authorities.

Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by hacker089 on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @01:35AM (#22746016)
>> 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.

Re:Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other C... by MagnumOpus on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @06:00AM (#22747169)
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.