Spark, you say you've already explained Germany but this thread moves fast and posts are often longer than I have time for at the point I open, so would you be so kind to explain again (or just quote that mother****er if you can find it easy enough)? Pretty plz
Sure - basically, people are looking at Germany and noticing that it has a case fatality rate (CFR) of well under 1%. It's more like 0.6% at the moment (281 deaths, 47278 confirmed cases) which is around the same as what South Korea's was a few weeks back in the early stages of its outbreak. This is being cited as evidence that the true mortality of this disease is well below the oft-cited 1%.
In fact this is entirely consistent with a 1% CFR, i.e. 1 person dying out of every 100 who catches the disease. The problem is that, well, not all of those 47000 cases will survive, and even if
no new cases appeared (obvs not going to happen), people are still going to die. So the mortality rate goes up. This is entirely because that a person who is sick may have been sick for a few weeks, or one week, or one day, but usually a person who dies has been sick for a few weeks. So deaths will "lag" case numbers by a few weeks typically. This is exactly what has happened in South Korea - over the last two weeks, the number of new cases has fallen away completely, but some of the existing cases unfortunately passed away, so its CFR has steadily ticked up and is now ~1.5%.
This video from Khan Academy actually explains it pretty well:
Given that Germany's outbreak still appears to be uncontained, that means that
given a 1% mortality rate, then you would expect to see many hundreds of cases for every death,
not 100 cases for a single death. But as the outbreak slowly moves out of its explosive exponential growth and the number of new cases subsides, the CFR you measure will steadily tick up as some of the thousands of sick people you already have die. It's a mistake a hell of a lot of people are making and it's leading them to faulty conclusions such as in that article FBU posted. Basically, the fact that Germany "seems" to have so few deaths is probably mostly a reflection of Germany having an excellent testing regime. Same with Iceland, which has done an incredible job with testing.