Germany has the lowest death rates on record even though the population of infected per age group was similar to Italy, but they are being very selective on testing dead people, so it could be a very misleading statistic - we may not know the true data, Germany may be doing something better than Italy or it could be worse and we just do not know, same as with all the states in the USA, if something is not being measured, all bets are off without a representative sampling or full sampling.
When the dust settles, it will be interesting to not think in term of absolute number of deaths, but in term of additional mortality over a normal year. I understand that something like 99% of people who died of this virus had pre-existing conditions, in many cases serious ones. Logically, a fraction of the victims may have died of something else that same year.
> Germany may be doing something better than Italy
been curious about that super spreader story we have been hearing about italy. they probably need to study what happened there so we can all learn from it.
maybe italy has a life style that made it easier for the virus to go around?
The shape of social graphs is likely very different across countries, but I don’t know of studies checking this. However, there are anecdata aplenty. My hometown in Spain has a lot of part timers in senior living facilities, so you will find, for instance, physical therapists working 2 or 3 facilities over the course of a week. We have confirmed examples of one therapist who contracted the virus somewhere, and now it’s on every facility he visited: Over a hundred people tested positive with him as the only link.
There is also how common it is for adult children to live with their parents, who might be retired already. Different networks do seniors and millennials that go to different places and have different links, but help the infection travel fast.
Given the low ICU capacity, a single case like this can overwhelm a local hospital system, with predictable results.
