Covid Germany Anomaly, Why? • Hacker News Board

Re: Covid Germany Anomaly, Why?

#11

Post by sloaken » Fri, Mar 27, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

nocorpwelfare wrote: post #9

eduma wrote: post #8

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!

I keep seeing that "next couple of weeks" phenomenon. At what point can we be assured that we crossed those ever-critical couple of weeks? It keeps pushing out. I am thinking that Corona is killing the same people who would have died from regular flu for the most part, i.e. it's not in addition to normal deaths. I understand that this is a minority opinion, but data may bear it out eventually.

Look at the 'worldometers' that someone else posted. You will see sloping lines there. You can judge for yourself when it has actually hit.

Because of a lack of ICU facilities, governments are hoping to push the critical point out as far as possible.

Re: Covid Germany Anomaly, Why?

#12

Post by ThePhysicist » Fri, Mar 27, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

_red wrote: post #2

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. The lack of standardized reporting is odd considering the impacts. It definitely seems to be contributing to the general confusion on decision making.

I don’t think so, have a look at the official guidelines for reporting Covid-19 cases (in German):

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

Basically every patient that shows symptoms of pneumonia gets tested for Covid-19 now, as well as all persons that were in direct contact with such a patient. Currently about 360,000 tests are done per week in Germany, next week more than 500,000 are projected. No country in the world tests more people per capital currently, so I really don’t think the numbers are underreported.

Re: Covid Germany Anomaly, Why?

#13

Post by unlinked_dll » Fri, Mar 27, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

nocorpwelfare wrote: post #9

eduma wrote: post #8

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!

I keep seeing that "next couple of weeks" phenomenon. At what point can we be assured that we crossed those ever-critical couple of weeks? It keeps pushing out. I am thinking that Corona is killing the same people who would have died from regular flu for the most part, i.e. it's not in addition to normal deaths. I understand that this is a minority opinion, but data may bear it out eventually.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/27/us-coronavirus-cases-top-100...

Re: Covid Germany Anomaly, Why?

#14

Post by zabana » Fri, Mar 27, 2020, 10:34 PM UTC

sloaken wrote: post #11

nocorpwelfare wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing that "next couple of weeks" phenomenon. At what point can we be assured that we crossed those ever-critical couple of weeks? It keeps pushing out. I am thinking that Corona is killing the same people who would have died from regular flu for the most part, i.e. it's not in addition to normal deaths. I understand that this is a minority opinion, but data may bear it out eventually.

Look at the 'worldometers' that someone else posted. You will see sloping lines there. You can judge for yourself when it has actually hit. Because of a lack of ICU facilities, governments are hoping to push the critical point out as far as possible.

except virus != ill != death

Re: Covid Germany Anomaly, Why?

#15

Post by syllogism » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

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.

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.

I made a little hypothetical to illustrate this.

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?

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.

So even though this fictional disease is 100% fatal, the "case fatality ratio" will stay under 1% all the way through the growth phase.

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.

Re: Covid Germany Anomaly, Why?

#16

Post by burntoutfire » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

nocorpwelfare wrote: post #9

eduma wrote: post #8

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!

I keep seeing that "next couple of weeks" phenomenon. At what point can we be assured that we crossed those ever-critical couple of weeks? It keeps pushing out. I am thinking that Corona is killing the same people who would have died from regular flu for the most part, i.e. it's not in addition to normal deaths. I understand that this is a minority opinion, but data may bear it out eventually.

Someone made a comparison of the number of deaths in one of severly affected Italian cities over the past couple of weeks vs an equivalent period there in 2019. The death count was something like 78 vs 18.