Germany has the fifth-most coronavirus cases in the world, but only a fraction of the death toll that has been seen in other countries. And the reason remains a mystery. “We don’t know the reason for the lower death rate,” Marieke Degen, deputy spokeswoman of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI), told me. [...]
In comparison, Italy has more 74,300 confirmed cases and over 7,500 deaths, which puts its fatality rate at 10 percent. In the United States, the fatality rate is currently at about 1.4 percent according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The huge discrepancy in fatality rates between Germany and Italy is also startling because both countries have some of the oldest populations in the world, according to the Washington, DC-based Population Reference Bureau. The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified people over the age of 60 and people with preexisting medical conditions as being at higher risk of experiencing more severe symptoms from Covid-19. [...]
But outside of Merkel’s forceful speech, Germany has more or less followed similar strategies to confront the spread of the virus as many other countries. “We don’t do anything special compared to other countries,” German virologist Martin Stürmer told me. [...]
But virologist Stürmer believes it is more likely the global fatality rate will be lower when all is said and done. “I think all over the world the rates will go down, because we have so many people with mild symptoms, which are not being tested and therefore they are not reflected in the data,” he said.
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