According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, approximately 23,000 Germans have contracted COVID-19 but only 91 have died from it. This appears to be an important number because unlike the United States, who has lagged behind most other industrialized nations for testing COVID19, the Germans have tested a LOT of people. According to THIS Guardian article linked HERE . According to the article:
“One advantage Germany has is that we started doing professional contact tracing when the first cases were reported,” Addo said. “It bought us some time to prepare our clinics for the coming storm.”
Crucially, Germany started testing people even with milder symptoms relatively early on, meaning the total number of confirmed cases may give a more accurate picture of the virus’s spread than in other states.
This may mean that the actual mortality rate of the illness is far lower than it would appear to be based on what we see in Italy, because the number of actual cases in Italy remains unknown, but the German numbers more accurately reflect the actual number of cases.
This may be wishful thinking, but South Korea also has a low rate of infection and low death rate. Both countries were proactive in early testing and tracing. The United States Government has wasted valuable time in enacting this measures and still is far behind in terms of dealing with this. That means that the COVID19 will not be contained in the US and we will see more fatalities than anywhere else in the world.
That, of course, is my half-educated guess. As a non-expert, I am relying upon a variety of sources that I have referred to in making this guess. I am certain the one thing that we do not want to do is minimize the threat here. While the COVID19 remains the most dangerous part of this situation, the second most dangerous part is the widespread ignorance in the US about the threat it entails and efforts to minimize the threat based upon economic considerations. This has been the engine of destruction in how we have dealt with this pandemic.
