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On 23/03/2020 11:59, RKOB via Marxism wrote:> Germany's low coronavirus
mortality rate intrigues experts
>
>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/germany-low-coronavirus-mortality-rate-puzzles-experts
>
>
> Coronavirus: why are so many more people dying in Italy than Germany?
>
>
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3076420/coronavirus-why-are-so-many-more-people-dying-italy-germany
>
That's a very interesting question. I've been trying to answer it as
well, and this is what I got so far:
1. Italy is much further into the epidemic than Germany. Looking at the
ratios of cases to active cases, the resolution of the vast majority of
German cases is still unknown. This is partly due to better testing
infrastructure which caught cases earlier, and partly due to the
epidemic arriving earlier to Italy when the need for it was less
understood, and there weren't as many PCR kits available (the
WHO-distributed test was developed in Germany).
2. Age of patients. Germany seems to have a much younger population of
patients so far. Normally with something like this, young patients are
more likely to be infected and spread it because they travel more, are
exposed to more people, and so on. This situation will probably change a
bit as the saturation increases in the population unless confinement
measures are taken, and effectively enforced.
3. Household composition and cultural factors. Multigenerational
households are much more common in Italy than they are in Germany.
Geographical mobility is rarer. Children are likely to live only a few
kilometers away from their parents. This results in much greater
exposure of old people from young people.
4. Other hypotheses. In this bucket I'd place issues like adequate
access to healthcare, and particularly hospital and IC treatment
(Germany has a lot more hospital beds per 100000 inhabitants than Italy
does, for instance). Prevalence of smoking. Other complicating previous
pathologies.
I'm in the Spanish state and things are not looking very good here
either, with a situation that seems much closer to that of Italy than
Germany. Some of it is the point of community transmission of the
illness, but some of it probably isn't.
If spring is warm, it may mitigate transmission in Southern Europe.
Hopefully.
Looking at the statistics, UK, NL and Switzerland look like they could
have a bad time coming. We'll see. Doubtless things will clarify when
more information is available.
I have a suspicion that an underappreciated factor is going to be the
degree of institutionalisation of old people, and the extent to which
those institutions are capable to operate adequate testing and isolation
regimes. This is pretty hard to measure a priori, though; but in Spain a
lot of the transmission and lethality of the illness can be attributed
to nursing homes, many of them private, many of them underfunded and
understaffed. I suspect Spain is not the only country in this situation,
just one of the first to face the wavefront.
Regards, and take care,
--David.
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