Mind Virus Media Is Pretending Low-Fatality Germany With Best Data in Europe Is the Outlier When It’s Clearly Italy
Wants to pretend Italy is the normal and what you can expect, when that's absolute hogwash
The mind virus media acting like Germany’s 0.9% mortality among confirmed infections is some big “mystery” an exception to the rule that needs special explanation:
Vox: The mystery of Germany’s low coronavirus death rate
The Times: Why Germany Has a Low Coronavirus Death Rate
The New York Times: Germany Has Relatively Few Deaths From Coronavirus. Why?
The Spectator: Why is the coronavirus mortality rate so much lower in Germany?
The Times:
[O]nly 560 people known to be suffering from the disease caused by the novel coronavirus have died there, putting Germany’s case fatality rate at just 0.9%. That gives Germany one of the lowest rates in the world, making it an outlier compared to places like Italy, where 11.0% of confirmed patients have died from the disease, and even the U.S., which has a rate of 1.8%.
How insane is it to say that Germany is an “outlier compared to places like Italy” when Italy is the biggest outlier of them all with the highest ratio of deaths to confirmed infections?
Yet the media wants to pretend the outlier Italy is the normal, and definitely not Germany with its best data in Europe — when even in Italy itself outside the heavily air-polluted Po River Valley covid deaths are in line with a mild flu.
Also, it’s misleading and highly irresponsible and sensationalist to keep blasting the “case fatality rate” into the air when everyone understands the true mortality rate — death outcomes compared to all infections — is far lower. Even in Germany, the real mortality rate is far lower than 0.9%, my guess, and of Japanese scientists, would be 0.1% or as low as 0.03% when you don’t count people who really died of an underlying condition and not of a glorified cold.
The New York Times:
Very few people seem to be dying. As of Saturday, of the 56,202 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, just 403 patients have died. That’s a fatality rate of 0.72 percent. By contrast, the current rate in Italy — where over 10,000 people have died — is 10.8 percent. In Spain, it’s 8 percent. Over twice as many people have died in Britain, where there are around three times fewer cases, than in Germany.
The startling numbers are something of an enigma. Some have hailed the country for breaking the spell of catastrophe; others have been far more guarded. What is going on here? And what can we learn from it?
There is no “enigma”, panic mongers! It’s Germany which of all the major European states has carried out the most testing, and therefore everyone else is the outlier! It’s Germany which has the best data that we should be drawing conclusions from, not Italy. Albeit even in Germany those who tested positive still account for only just a fraction of those infected.
Time and time again countries that carry out more testing like South Korea report lower crude fatality rates and lower rates of infections who require special medical attention.
They can’t be that much dimmer than we here at Anti-Empire so clearly they have an incentive to play this up.
The very simple reason for the differences is how deaths are recorded. In the UK corona virus is now a notifiable disease which means if they find any virus in you it goes on the death certificate even if you are killed in a traffic accident. This enormously increases the apparent death rate. Italy suffers very high mortality every year from respiratory disease and normally you don’t hear about it. This year it suits the narrative to keep the panic going.