first death in Germany

I wonder why Italy's age distribution continues to be so skewed toward older people having the virus, even as testing has increased? Extrapolating from the country's demographic data, that discrepancy would mean some 10,000 undetected cases among younger people, if it hasn't disproportionately targeted older people for whatever reason.

Edit - case in point, more Italians between 80 - 89 died just today than all deaths since the beginning of the outbreak put together in South Korea, come on.

1492 new cases and 133 new deaths in Italy today. Already twice as many cases per 1m population as China and there is no slowing down in sight, yet.

So, Italy is close to what, 400 deaths already?

First German death, yes, but not the first death in Germany, so the streak goes on.

The decline in China took extreme measures. That decline skewed the data for a while making the growth rate look linear rather than exponential. The cases outside China have been growing exponentially, as well as the deaths. The death rate on the cruise ship doesn't include those that have been repatriated and have died at home, besides that, 32 are still in serious / critical conditions and 444 active cases left. 245 have recovered so far.

Death rate lags behind, this disease can take weeks to kill people. Recovery rate lags further behind. Recoveries in China are responsible for making the daily growth in active cases look like linear growth. However active cases growth is accelerating as well again.

What I've learned so far, different countries, different test methods. Some don't test at all, some assume it could be covid-19 without actual confirmation, not all tests are fool proof, false positives and false negatives can skew the data.

However the more numbers, the closer the average comes to the actual data. And that's currently anywhere between 3.4% (deaths / total detected cases) and 6% (deaths / closed cases) without further data. And yep, there are more undetected cases, and there are over 6K fighting for their life atm out of 45K active cases, some of which will move on to critical and some will still die.

It's not going away or calming down on its own. I wonder how long still until airline traffic gets halted or you have to provide proof of negative test for covid 19 before boarding.

oh you're right. I skimmed through the news story and thought he caught the virus in Egypt and died back home in Germany.

Updated : March 8th evening (Europe time zone)

Compared to other European countries, it could be that many older Italians still live with their families. In countries like Germany, as bad as it is, many old people don't live with their families. They live in nursing homes or simply alone and have almost no contact to other people. 

If you have less social contacts or are in a closed environment, it obviously protects you a little bit more from a potential infection.

Most deaths disproportionately come out of the three main outbreaks - Wuhan, Italy and Iran - even when adjusted for the number of recoveries and closed cases. This suggests there is some significant underreporting going on in these places.

They've also detected far less mild and assymptomatic cases too, compared to the places who can afford to test everyone who might have been in contact with the virus, in case you think it might be due to hospitals being overcrowded and whatnot.

I mean, H1N1 in 2009 had a 4% death rate in the US according to over 100,000 confirmed cases, but that number still can't obviously be reliable. So yeah, that's the gist of how these things work.