| > or where severity mix and/or mortality are strongly out of line with expectations. Yes, that was the only conclusion I was able to make based on Germany's data being so different in the proportion of known cases against reported deaths. Some arguments from there like to explain their results as "superior" hospitals and the "lack of hygiene" as the cause of the results of Italy, Spain, France etc. and I just don't buy it. It seems to me rather a result of a combination of more factors: my explanation at the moment is that they already had more old people in hospitals, and that they had for a lot of such people already "diagnosed" what brought them there, not changing it now when they die. As we see from the user
nathell reporting from Poland, they are not the only land with such an idea. It earns them short term prestige for "superior" health system, but it obscures what's going on. If they manage to keep doing this with the newly admitted cases remains at the moment unknown. The real story behind all the graphs, anyway, is not in the numbers which we can see from the statistics of "reported cases" or "deaths", but those that are only to read between the lines, and which are the actual causes for all the measures introduced by all the countries, and that is for the countries at the start: - how far are they from the health system being overflown and for the countries where it progressed: - how many people are without necessary medical care due to the health system not being able to handle, and how many people die due to that. Both of those are something that the countries would rather not directly report. So that's why, from some point on, the only conclusion we will be able to reliably have would be possible if we'd be able to have the actual death statistics (including the cases not claimed to be Covid-19 cases) and compare these statistics with the statistics in the "normal times." All surges are then surely indirectly (due to the disruption of all the country's systems) and directly caused by Covid-19, even if they aren't reported as such. Back to the data we have now, I also find the ft.com graphics the best on the web at the moment. https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest The log-log graph from this title is only useful post-factum and I don't agree with its current advantages claimed in the video at the moment. It is obscuring the current severe issues in most of the countries: Contrary to the claims of the video, at the moment, most of the countries indeed should look at the charts of log of whatever on the y axis against the linear time on the x axis. With the doubling time of around 3 days, that means that whichever capacities you manage to provide, like hospital beds, or more health workers, whenever you double them, that "advantage" disappears in just three more days. Linear time on x axis is the only sensible choice. The charts should allow us having some idea what the future brings. |
That sounds pretty wrong, and it's not what I've been hearing here in Germany. The "official" story is that testing ramped up earlier relative to when the outbreak started, and that through luck so far the virus hasn't infected many retirement homes and old people in general. [0]
If you break down cases / deaths in Germany by state and by district, you find that the districts that had big outbreaks the earliest also have the highest death rate now.
Heinsberg, the original hotspot, is now at something around 2.5% [1]. So I think it really is consistent with the story that testing started relatively earlier so fewer cases were missed, at least initially (there are reports now that non-symptomatic contact persons of confirmed cases are not getting tested anymore due to test shortages). This would imply that the death rate would converge to the world-wide average over time, which seems to be happening.
[0] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/covid-19-warum-die-todesrate-...
[1] https://interaktiv.tagesspiegel.de/lab/karte-sars-cov-2-in-d...