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by piokoch 2289 days ago
Note that in Germany registered cause of death is a "first disease", so if someone had a cancer, tuberculosis, heart problems, they are set as a cause of death, even though such person was diagnosed coronavirus and died.

This approach makes some sense, if someone was so sick that getting coronavirus or even a standard flu caused immediate death, indeed the primary reason that a given person died is the condition that person already had.
2 comments
rerx 2289 days ago
Do you have a source for this claim? Otherwise, please don't spread unsubstantiated rumors.

All reported Corona deaths in the German media that I am aware of were linked to pre-existing health conditions.

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lm28469 2289 days ago
Not sure why this is downvoted. It seems very likely considering the numbers of death. DE numbers of infected (13k) is between FR (9k) and SP (17k), but the number of death in DE (33) is 8 times less than FR (260) and 23 times less than SP (760).

Right now DE is #5 in term of cases and #11 in term of death. Either the way they count death is different or they are way better at detecting cases and FR/SP have many (100k+) undetected cases.

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MagnumOpus 2289 days ago
> they are way better at detecting cases and FR/SP have many (100k+) undetected cases.

This is the case. Germany tests 10k-12k people a day - everyone with a symptom. Other big countries only test 1-2k per day, i.e. only severe hospitalised cases. So the undetected/unregistered case count is an order of magnitude higher in FR/ES/UK.

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detaro 2289 days ago
Testing everyone with a symptom would be nice, but coverage is not quite that good here.
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detaro 2289 days ago
It seems like some Italian official theorized that Germany might be misreporting in an interview and now it gets repeated as a fact over and over (at least that's the only source I've seen cited, if you have others I'd love to see them - it would be important to know), while a simple look into German news reports shows you that tons of the reported deaths are linked to other illnesses.

I don't have good data for Germany overall, but at least here in Berlin a large chunk of the currently known infections spread through night clubs, giving you lots of fairly young and otherwise healthy infected. If there was spread from those to more vulnerable groups, they're likely not infected long enough to have died from it yet.

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