When comparing how countries around the world are coping with COVID-19, one country immediately stands out.
In Germany, just 0.6% of their confirmed coronavirus cases have so far ended up being fatal - the lowest figure amongst any of the most affected countries.
The next best case fatality rate is 1.4%, which can be found in the United States, Switzerland, Portugal and South Korea, while in some countries the death rate is substantially higher. In Italy, 10.1% of confirmed cases have ended up proving fatal.
The answer to why Germany's figure is so much better partly lies in the way the case fatality rate is calculated. The figure is produced by dividing the number of deaths by the total number of confirmed cases.
This means if a country only tests seriously ill patients they will have a higher case fatality rate, as a higher proportion of these patients will die.
Whereas, if a country carries out more tests, and also identifies people with mild forms of the disease, their figure will be much lower.
In the early stages of the disease Germany carried out thousands of tests and implemented rigorous contact tracing. This allowed it to identify substantially more cases of the disease than other countries - as the more tests you do, the more cases you identify, as the chart below shows.
Germany's low case fatality rate is therefore partly caused by the fact it has tested more people and, as a result, has identified more mild instances of the disease.
In comparison, in the UK, only people who need medical assistance are being tested and as a result the UK's case fatality rate is much higher, at 4.8%.GO READ THE WHOLE THING.
Many of the people who have been spreading the falsely high death rates are WELL AWARE OF THE TRUTH OF WHAT IS WRITTEN IN THE ARTICLE ABOVE.
This means they knowingly spread a false impression about the death rate of COVID.
Spreading this kind of negativity robs the more fragile among us of Hope.
Spreading truth is not a bad thing.
But when we only have part of the information, we need to remind people consistently that we are only working with part of the information.
In this case, those who pay attention have all been well aware that we have a "DENOMINATOR PROBLEM."
That is to say, we don't know the total number of cases.
So the published lethality rates are based on EXTREMELY INCOMPLETE INFORMATION.
When this all plays out, I suspect the lethality rate will have been revised downward to about .0015 to, perhaps .002.
That would mean that no more people will die of this than in a really bad year of the flu.
AND THEN THERE'S THIS:
DR FAUCI: CORONAVIRUS MORTALITY RATE CLOSER TO A VERY BAD FLU
2 comments:
Can we all get back to our lives now? And engage in more targeted measures that will protect the vulnerable demographics while allowing the rest of us to provide for our families and pay for this mess?
From the first link in this blog post (emphasis:
By testing people who might have been exposed to the disease, Germany has been able to identify cases of coronavirus quicker and isolate people who have been infected.
This has helped prevent the disease from being spread to vulnerable groups....
I wonder how many would have to be isolated -- and how that isolation would be accomplished.
Also, from what I can read here, we need mandatory testing of every American adult -- and possibly every American child.
Am I wrong? Please set me straight if I am not.
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