Germany with 83 million people has thousands testing positive for Wuhan Flu but its death rates are the lowest in the world. The rate is figured on how many have died of the number testing positive for the illness. (In all countries if universal testing were possible all fatality rates would plummet.)
Germany is utilizing some self – isolation, people are still out getting exercise and many small businesses have closed. However, Germany’s factories are working.
Confirmed Corona cases in Germany are at 100,123 with 1,584 (1.5%) dying. On the same day the US had 336,830 cases with 9,618 deaths (2.8%), Italy had 128,948 ill with 15,887 fatalities (12.3%) and China’s figures are fraudulent.
So, what is Germany doing differently to keep fatalities low? They do not employ a centrally managed disease control center like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Germany's equivalent to the U.S. CDC --- the Robert Koch Institute — makes recommendations but does not control testing or issue mandates for the entire country. Germany's 16 federal states make their own decisions on coronavirus testing because each of them is responsible for their own health care systems.
"I believe that we are just testing much more than in other countries, and we are detecting our outbreak early," said Christian Drosten, director of the institute of virology at Berlin's Charité hospital.
Drosten, whose team developed the first COVID-19 test used in public, said Germany's low death-rate is due to his country's ability to test early and often. He estimates that Germany has been testing around 120,000 people a week for COVID-19 from late February to late March, when sickness reached epidemic proportions in the country. They employed the most extensive testing regimen in the world.
This means that Germany is more likely to have fewer undetected cases than other countries where testing is less prevalent. Why is Germany testing so much?
"We have a culture here in Germany that is actually not supporting a centralized diagnostic system," said Drosten, "so Germany does not have a public health laboratory that would restrict other labs from doing the tests. So we had an open market from the beginning."
A more diversified free enterprise approach to processing samples is used versus a centrally-dictated model meaning fewer bureaucratic barriers. Drosten said this has meant quicker, earlier and more widespread testing in Germany than in other countries.
Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute, said last week that Germany's testing regimen and approach means authorities have a more accurate read of confirmed cases of the virus.
"We don't know exactly how many unknown cases there are, but we estimate that this unknown number is not very high," Wieler said. "The reason is simple. We issued recommendations in mid-January about who should be tested and who shouldn't be tested."
Germany’s diversified less bureaucratic medical testing process quickly addressed a large number of infected people and prevented them from dying.
The number of new cases in Germany has been decreasing daily since April 2. America’s new cases dropped on April 5. All countries’ Coronavirus statistics can be followed at worldometers.info.
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