Not positives. DEATHS. We don't use comorbidities as excuaes, you do. We test the dead. You don't. We mark those dead during known outbreak as corona casualties before testing them. You don't mark them as corona at all unless already tested and no comorbidities found.
What country are you refering to? Seeing how you mentioned Germany earlier, I want to clear things up in regards to us Krauts:
Germany has insanely low death numbers, however that is not a result of using comorbidities as excuses. In fact, anyone who was tested positive with Corona that dies will be registered as a Corona-Death, the system does not diffrentiate between people who are 30 years old, healthy and die solely of Corona or someone who's 95 years old, has alzheimers, last-stage brain cancer and a light case of Corona. Someone dies with a positive Corona test, that person will be counted towards the Corona Death Toll.
Similarly, Germany has been very diligent in testing people (edit: recently, tests ranged from 200,000 to 300,000
a week /edit), especially when someone goes to the hospital. While not impossible, it' still very unlikely that someone dies of Corona (or while also suffering from Corona) without it being known.
There are three reasons why the death toll in Germany is so low at the moment:
For one thing, the first to suffer from Corona were comparatively young people. The vast majority (like 75%) of our sick are between the age of 15 and 59 and only a small amount is beyond the age of 60. The first ones to get sick were mainly young people who caught Corona while skiing in South Tyrol.
On the other side, many senior citizens live in retirement homes. Compared to many other nations, Germany has a rather low amount of 3-generation homes, which essentially acts as a social distancing mechanism for older folks. Also, retirement homes closed themsevles off to the public quickly, too, to protect the people living there. Nonetheless, in combination with the first point, it is only a matter of time until this sickness also reaches older people and then Germany's numbers will sadly increase, too.
Lastly, Germany testing so many people systematically also means we have a lot of positive cases that are comparetively mild, that might fly under the radar otherwise. This inflates our number of sick people, but that also reduces the percentage of people that died compared to those that are sick.
Another factor might be that Germany has roughly 8,3 hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants. Italy and Spain have about 3 per 1,000 inhabitants.
You are underselling it. They put most of the country udner lockdown, started limiting heavily how much you could go outside. They had checkpoints everywhere checking your temperature. If you walked outside you had to wear a mask, and the few places that were open, like grocery stores, were trying to limit any sources of infection. You use your phone for everything there, like paying for stuff, and it's an easy source of keeping people under surveillance. If you are found to breaking your quarantine they would weld you into your home or send you into quarantine centers.
there's probably more, and things probably varied quite a bit form place to place, but you get the idea. When you start implementing things like this the infection is bound to slow down.
My point is that any such measurement was most likely coming way too late to stop it from going apeshit in their entire population.
Do you really believe that the CCP managed to stop this spread entirely? Even if they did, we both agree that the number of sick is most likely higher than reported by at least one order of magnitude.
