Why does Germany have such a low number of serious/critical covid patients? The last number I saw was 23 which is nuts compared to a country such as Spain with a similar case count. Water, beer, schnitzel? What’s the magic there?
German resident (md) here. The ‘official’ explanation is that Germany did lot of testing early in the course of the epidemic. We have many cases in the healthy population resulting in less severe symptoms. The older population is still not so much affected. A significant rise in death-counts is expected in the next two weeks. Hospitals are planing for the worst.
Stay safe!
The cases and deaths counts aren't informative enough to really say anything useful about what's going on. When a "case" is reported, we don't when the symptoms started occurring, or even when the original sample was collected. So you can't really draw any conclusions from this "consumer grade" information. You'd have to study it properly, and look a sample of individual case progressions.<p>I think the CFR stat is especially misleading, and we shouldn't be trying to compare it. For instance, if a country simply has a longer lag between testing and reporting the tests, the CFR will look higher. CFR will also look lower if the growth rate is high.<p>I made a little hypothetical to illustrate this.<p>Imagine a disease where your skin turns bright green on day 8 and you drop dead on day 30, without fail for all infections. It's growing 25% a day. What's the "CFR" at day 100?<p>In this hypothetical, all infections are symptomatic, all symptomatic cases are detected, and all symptomatic cases are fatal. But people don't drop dead immediately -- it takes 22 days, and at 25% a day the number of cases grows 135x in that period.<p>So even though this fictional disease is 100% fatal, the "case fatality ratio" will stay under 1% all the way through the growth phase.<p>In summary: those stats aren't really evidence that Germany's outbreak is progressing any differently from anyone else's. The information is much too vague to say one way or another. Instead the baseline assumption is, Germany has the same virus as everywhere else, and is applying the same treatments. So for any individual patients, the outlooks will be the same here as anywhere else that still has ICU beds and ventilators available.
From what I understand, countries like Germany are only reporting deaths with no co-morbidity, whereas Italy anyone that was positive with Covid19 in their system and dies is being reported as a death.<p>The lack of standardized reporting is odd considering the impacts. It definitely seems to be contributing to the general confusion on decision making.