
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus”
“On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three,” he says. This puts Italy’s current death rate at 1038 vs 9134!! And we have yet to see any statistical evidence for excess deaths, in any part of the world. “We are only 2/3 weeks behind Italy” that is a phrase that has been widely used and bolstered public opinion in the strict social distancing measures.
Reports of people being intrigued by the way Germany are handling may be explained by Dietrich Rothenbacher, a professor at the Institute for Epidemiology and Medical Biometry at Germany’s Ulm University.“The Italians test deceased persons who had specific symptoms and bring them into the statistics — we in Germany do not,”
“It’s a complex scenario,” he said. Before any solid comparison can be made between countries, Rothenbacher feels strongly that “the first step would be to obtain comparable numbers.”
Tener Goodwin Veenema, a professor of nursing and public health at Johns Hopkins University cautioned that it will be difficult to determine the illness’s true fatality rate until more data is collected from the pandemic.
Are the numbers being over estimated – “The numbers we’re getting from the other countries have probably overestimated the infection fatality rate, so that’s Italy, Spain, France, the U.K. and the U.S., because there is not enough testing,” said Miguel Hernan, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard.
Estimating Case fatality rates in the early stage of outbreaks is subject to considerable uncertainties, the estimates are likely to change as more data emerges.
The overall case fatality rate as of 16 July 2009 (10 weeks after the first international alert) with pandemic H1N1 influenza varied from 0.1% to 5.1% depending on the country. The WHO reported in 2019 that swine flu ended up with a fatality rate of 0.02%. Evaluating CFR during a pandemic is a hazardous exercise, and high-end estimates end be treated with caution as the H1N1 pandemic highlights that original estimates were out by a factor greater than 10.
Sources of information have been cited below
https://www.cebm.net/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/why-does-germany-have-low-coronavirus-death-rate/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/why-are-so-few-germans-dying-coronavirus-experts-wonder-n1168361
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think