If theres a silver lining to this pandemic hopefully it will make people realize the importance of having competent leaders and institutions.
Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries
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Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries
#12I think in the end the number I'll judge countries by is how low they held the death rate per population. A better number would be a population death rate weighted by demographics, but I don't think that'll be easy to construct. Increasing the denominator by testing lots and lots of people is important only if testing lots and lots of people helps you prevent more people from dying. Germany is doing pretty well on th…
Yeah, if you look deaths as a fraction of population Germany seems to be on roughly equal footing with the U.S.
It's hard to say what's working.
Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries
#13Worth 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 Countries
#14I think in the end the number I'll judge countries by is how low they held the death rate per population. A better number would be a population death rate weighted by demographics, but I don't think that'll be easy to construct. Increasing the denominator by testing lots and lots of people is important only if testing lots and lots of people helps you prevent more people from dying. Germany is doing pretty well on th…
Yeah, if you look deaths as a fraction of population Germany seems to be on roughly equal footing with the U.S. It's hard to say what's working.
Germany's curve is way better looking than ours though. Eventually it's very likely that Germany will settle at a lower population-adjusted fatality rate than the U.S. But it's not going to look at good as their raw CFR would indicate.
Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries
#15NPR did better reporting on this phenomenon than German media, well done!
They did? There was literally nothing in there that hasn’t been said several times and the structure of this pretty short article was "1. Official data and official analysis; 2. A single anecdote as counterpoint; 3. Meaningless official opinion on the anecdote that’s meaningless as it’s nothing but a single anecdote". I like NPR, but highlighting this as "better reporting"?
Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries
#16I think in the end the number I'll judge countries by is how low they held the death rate per population. A better number would be a population death rate weighted by demographics, but I don't think that'll be easy to construct. Increasing the denominator by testing lots and lots of people is important only if testing lots and lots of people helps you prevent more people from dying. Germany is doing pretty well on th…
In the long-term it might also be important to look at the economy at least a few years down the line. It might be that some countries will find it very difficult to recover from the crisis because the lockdown hurt the economy too much. That has a cost in lives too.
Economies are surprisingly resilient. It’s systemic causes not temporary disruptions that cause long term issues.
Just look at say Japan after the tsunami which not only killed people but also destroyed a lot of critical infrastructure.
Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries
#17Less fat people.
Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries
#18Worth 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 sit…
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 Countries
#19So much contradictory information through this epedemic. CNN just ran an article highly critical of decentralized approaches. (They were advocating top-down, unified actions on a country-wide basis.) Here, NPR tells us Germany is doing well because the regions are able to act autonomously. Hard for us armchair quarterbacks.
The "decentralized approach" thing wrt Germany is something I’ve seen mentioned several times in English media (I assume Drosten said it in a press conference). I don’t know how it is in other countries, but it seems to me this is only great in comparison to the US problems of broken centralization, and only regarding the testing. There are several demands of higher centralization in Germany when it comes to information: reporting of cases, information about hospital beds, and distribution of patients based on those.
Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the long-term it might also be important to look at the economy at least a few years down the line. It might be that some countries will find it very difficult to recover from the crisis because the lockdown hurt the economy too much. That has a cost in lives too.
> That has a cost in lives too. Four times as many people have already died from COVID-19 as are ever supposed to have died from great recession excess suicides, and we are just getting started with COVID-19. And the effect of recessions on overall mortality is much less clear (fewer die in commuting car accidents during recessions, for example). There's just no plausible way that a recession following this pandemic…
Suicides is certainly the most obvious and explicit way to measure loss of life from the 2008 recession, but it's certainly not the whole story. Overdose deaths (70,000+ in 2018 in the US), and other addiction-related deaths are probably significantly exasperated by economic crisis.
I'm not arguing that the deaths from the virus won't outnumber deaths related to the quarantine, but they will be significant. They will also be much more likely to involve younger people whereas the virus is mostly killing people who are within a 10 years of reaching the average life expectancy for their country or above.