Why Is Germany’s Coronavirus Death Rate So Low?

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[As usual, the Germans are doing their stuff, without fuss, without bother and the White man's science is working properly … as always. Jan]

With more than 63,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of March 30, Germany is one of the countries worst-affected by the pandemic, according to official statistics.

But only 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%.

According to experts, Germany’s case fatality rate is so low due to its widespread testing. “In some countries only very symptomatic cases are tested (e.g. in Italy) and in others a broader testing strategy is done (e.g. in Germany),” writes Dr. Dietrich Rothenbacher, the director of the Institute for Epidemiology at Ulm University in Germany, in an email to TIME. That means that while Germany is currently the country with the fifth-most infections in the world, chances are that it has fewer unreported cases than many other countries, where testing is harder to come by.

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“Between countries there are several reasons why the death rate might vary, but they’re very small compared to the impact of how many people get tested,” says Dr. Liam Smeeth, a professor of clinical epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “Germany very rapidly rolled out testing to a very large number of people, relative to the population.”

As of March 15, Germany was behind only the UAE, South Korea and Australia as the country to have administered the most tests in the world per capita, at an estimated 2,023 per million people. (In South Korea, the only of these countries where the pandemic is at a similarly advanced stage to Germany, the case fatality rate stands at around 1.6%.) On March 20, Lothar Wieler, the president of the Robert Koch Institute—Germany’s main public health body—said German laboratories are now able to conduct some 160,000 tests per week, about as many as they performed in the entire two months to March 15.

Source: https://time.com/5812555/germany-coronavirus-deaths/