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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

#31

Post by Tomte »

adventured wrote: post #18
losvedir wrote: post #13

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 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 W…

> 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 Countries

#32

Post by knocte »

losvedir wrote: post #13

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 sit…

> 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).

Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries

#33

Post by s9w »

The media should stop calling this death rate or corona deaths. These deaths are not (all) from the virus, rather occurred in people who died and had a positive test. These things can be (and I assume are) vastly different.

Just as a thought experiment: The same metric would give herpes a 100% death rate.

Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries

#34

Post by Zenst »

Exmoor wrote: post #20
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There will also be suicides related to this event as well, one example https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/german-mi...

Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries

#35

Post by Zenst »

malandrew wrote: post #26
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die per day due to poverty. That's over 8 million per year. And that's just children while poverty has been the lowest it has ever been. What do you think is going to happen in developing countries in the next few years? Absolute mortality will likely be around 1% or less once you take into account all those that are asymptomatic and much of this 1% would die in the next decade du…

If the media plotted a minute by minute uptodate map showing those deaths due to poverty, people's mindsets would change.

But the impact and knock on effects of this pandemic, will not exactly help poverty related deaths and without a doubt, exacerbate them.

Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries

#36

Post by Barrin92 »

Semaphor wrote: post #19
RickJWagner wrote: post #3

So 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 informat…

I think if you look at the level of care in Germany that you get even in remote towns (corona virus aside), there is a lot to be said for the decentralised model.

A lot of states, not just the US have highly unequal public infrastructure. France being one of the bigger examples, but the UK too.

There's a very basic Hayekian argument about the problems of concentrating so much knowledge and capacity in the capital alone. It simply impedes flow of information, it creates distrust and simply put dysfunction.

People in the anglosphere don't just ask these questions about Germany when it comes to healthcare, they also often ask them when they see regions like the Rustbelt or North England and compare it to the German Mittelstand. In many ways the centralised model is broken.

Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries

#37

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

malandrew wrote: post #26
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die per day due to poverty. That's over 8 million per year. And that's just children while poverty has been the lowest it has ever been. What do you think is going to happen in developing countries in the next few years? Absolute mortality will likely be around 1% or less once you take into account all those that are asymptomatic and much of this 1% would die in the next decade du…

It seems like you are assuming a much larger asymptomatic rate than what has been published. Because population fatality rate without healthcare would probably be in the 3-7% range, and true asymptomatic cases are only around 20% (at least based on Diamond Princess data). There are around 1.2 billion people in Africa, yielding a death toll on that continent around 36M souls at the low end. Four years of childhood poverty-related deaths.

Even without any public health intervention, a death toll like this would spark a major recession most folks withdrew from economic activity out of fear. Even if you ignored it at the governmental level, it would quickly be impossible to ignore at the social level. Pretending that we can just push through that many deaths is a fantasy.

I doubt your prediction of a doubling of extreme poverty would come to pass. The folks we're talking about are already in many cases living at a subsistence level. They are not depending on an export economy to keep their households fed. But even supposing it does, it would take four years of that to make up for the losses due to unchecked COVID-19, and that's assuming that such a scenario caused no economic setbacks, which is just not plausible.

Anyway, none of that is going to happen. No political regime would survive sitting idly by as 2-3% of the population expires. So lockdown and public health intervention will ultimately be the order of the day everywhere. The theory that any other approach would do better will not be tested.

Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries

#38

Post by _trampeltier »

I know from italy for ex. if you are tested positive on Corona, no matter how you die (a tank drove over you twice) you will end up in the "death with Corona" spreadsheet. I don't know about other countrys does this handle. Also normaly, if very old people get sick (like my grandma died) they don't go to the emergency hospital. They might go to a hospital, but usually they don't try to save lives at all costs.

Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries

#39

Post by jariel »

a) Not the death rate. It's just 'deaths/tested' which is something else.

b) I don't see how the decentralized system entails more testing. Canada is decentralized and has more testing by the US, but it's because the respective authorities 'just did it'. The logic of 'some labs blocking others' makes no sense. If S. Korea wanted to do 'the most testing' it might be in their self-interest to 'centrally plan' thereby ensuring that it's also pointed in the right direction.

c) Canada has 1/3 the per-capita cases of Germany.

Re: Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Lower Than in Other Countries

#40

Post by Semaphor »

Barrin92 wrote: post #36
Semaphor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informat…

I think if you look at the level of care in Germany that you get even in remote towns (corona virus aside), there is a lot to be said for the decentralised model. A lot of states, not just the US have highly unequal public infrastructure. France being one of the bigger examples, but the UK too. There's a very basic Hayekian argument about the problems of concentrating so much knowledge and capacity in the capital alo…

> I think if you look at the level of care in Germany that you get even in remote towns (corona virus aside), there is a lot to be said for the decentralised model.

Is it better? I really don’t know, all I heard about this are the complaints about rural areas being underserved by doctors, especially GPs

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