Time is also a factor.

You dont die instantly to this, you lose a battle of contrition to the virus.
That means a like week or two on a ventilator.

Spread wasnt very serious in America a week or two back.
So mortality rates should be lower in america, than say in italy, where the outbreak has been for longer.

However I think maybe mortality rates will be lower in US, compaired lateron.
Why? treatments will have improved by then, and medicine might play a factor.

1 in every 9 people.  Governor said yesterday 90k people were tested and we had over 10k cases yesterday.

If I'm not mistaken, Germany actually has a slightly older population than Italy. 

Well one more thing, this was based on early data from China
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001316

The key factors being a mean incubation time of 5.2 days and an R0 of 2.2, that translates to a daily growth factor of 1.16
The average global growth factor is between 1.17 and 1.18 in the past week. Europe ranges from 1.03 to 1.26.

So no, I don't think China's numbers are bogus.

Taking the growth factor from that article into account and given a daily amount of new cases of 3884 on Februari 4th, it would have taken 102 days of steady 1.16x growth to get to that number bringing us back to October 25th 2019.

I don't know what else to say, the math simply fits.

(Btw even the highest observed growth rate in Europe atm 1.26, still puts patient zero back to the end of November for China)

Italy's situation is likely more directly correlated to how tight their family units are than anything. A tragedy, really. What is otherwise an admirable way of life, and an enviable closeness, is now effectively weaponized against them.

Yep, but it also depends on where it spreads. Italy has many more grand parents live in with their children. Also when the school closures started happening the grand parents stepped in to watch the kids while the parents kept working.

It also started differently.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/guymartin/2020/03/20/with-its-covid-19-caseload-spiking-to-14000-heres-why-germanys-mortality-rate-is-002-or-4000-times-lower-than-italys/#72aa46b777ad

There is one major difference between Germany's Covid-19 demographic and that of the pan-European hot zone of Italy. The first is that the onslaught of Covid-19 arrived in the teeth of Europe's ski season, so that many Germans who initially contracted the virus did so in Italy, which is why—for the moment—70% of all reported cases in Germany remain among the young, or more broadly, among the not-elderly, between the ages of 20 and 50.

The corollaries to extrapolate are that most (not all) people who ski are of average or above-average fitness, regardless of age, and that, in order to go skiing safely, there is a decided, natural fitness barrier that does exist as the skiers get older. Muscularly and in basic orthopedic terms, it's just not possible for every 70-to-90-year-old to ski. Put another way, this initial group of self-selected, relatively fit patients in Germany were in generally decent shape, and have to a large extent survived Covid-19. Obviously, the native, elderly non-skiing demographic strata of Italy were exposed early and often, along with everybody else in the hot zones of the northern tier of that country.

Yes the avg. incubation time is 12 days  (before you show symptoms).


Also I remember you asked about testing vs infection, and % of such.

Yesterday? (I think) it was mentioned there had been done almost 200k tests in america (like ~195k? or something), and 44k? in new york.

Now it takes about 3-5 days for most to get test results back.

So 3-5 days from now, you can compaire the amount of "confirmed infected" cases in the USA / New York, with then shown infected cases.
That should answear your question.

Chancellor Merkel now under quarantinue due to her doctor being tested Corona positive. Thank god I'm not working there anymore

Some good news, Italy is finally reporting less new daily cases than the day before. Hopefully it's not an outlier, instead finally caught up with testing and running out of new suspected cases. The death toll is also slightly down but that doesn't mean anything yet at this stage.