I mentioned the CFR increasing in Germany relative to actual registered positive cases (currently at 0.6%). You are right though, the increase seems to be less in Germany, than in other countries - but it is increasing.Fulcrum wrote: ↑27 Mar 2020, 18:14The CFR in Germany isn't increasing much, if at all, if you consider the lag effect between confirmed diagnosis and outcome (death or recovery).
If you model deaths recorded "today" as a function of prior cases, where "prior" can mean anything between 5-15 days, then Germany's CFR has remained fairly constant relative to a lag of 7 days; this rate being ~ 1.7% of confirmed cases.
The speed at which it increases IMO is directly linked to the capacity of the health system. A health system operating well within its limit can keep patients alive. One that is operating over, can not and people die [sooner] without help. Germany is still at a very low number relative to its population. If you check Switzerland however, you'll see that our number of cases per population is in fact higher than Italy itself.
Some of these numbers are a bit skewed though, obviously. If you have the ability to count more, you are likely to have more positive cases (most countries are limited in their ability to test, not people infected). And I assume the fact that our country is only testing people with severe symptoms will also have an impact on the current CFR. However, as time goes on - people who don't have symptoms, might develop symptoms until eventually showing up at a hospital with severe symptoms and get counted then. Others who survive the illness without leaving their home might never show up in our statistics, because they'll never get counted/tested.
It is my personal opinion that we are far too early to be making any predictions or assessments if we'll go the way of Italy (and Spain) or if our countries defeat the numbers.
In Switzerland, we're 1 month (30 days) since the first case tested positive. Considering many cases develop symptoms only after 5-10 days, start out with very mild symptoms for a week until possibly developing more severe symptoms, I don't know - numbers of fatalities could explode here too to the point we'll be seeing a similar surreal CFR.
I assume Italy wasn't much different - I think people have been infected and showing signs of the illness way before they actually started testing, thus their CFR started out way higher than anyone elses. In other words; they were well into the progression of the pandemic when they started testing and people showing up at hospitals.
Compare that to Germany, where they obviously started way earlier with a well established process of testing.
