Italy has more deaths than China, Germany remains at low lethality

Italian civil protection said on Thursday 427 additional deaths from the coronavirus in the last 24 hours, bringing the national death toll to 3,405 deaths since February 21. The day before, 475 new deaths had been reported. This assessment is now heavier than that of China, where the coronavirus killed 3,245 people.

The total number of cases counted in Italy rose in 24 hours from 35,713 to 41,035. This increase of 14.9% is higher than that of the last three days, according to the Civil Protection. Of this total, 4,440 people are fully recovered, and 2,498 are in intensive care.

Italy has mobilized its army to evacuate the corpses of victims of the new coronavirus in Bergamo, a city located in the heart of the main epidemic center in the country and whose funeral services are overwhelmed.

Images filmed by residents of the Lombard city northeast of Milan and broadcast on the site of the local newspaper Eco di Bergamo show a long column of military vehicles circulating at night in the city streets and recovering coffins in the cemetery .

An army spokesman confirmed on Thursday that 15 trucks and 50 soldiers had been deployed to transfer the bodies to neighboring provinces. Local authorities in Bergamo had previously appealed for help with the cremation of the bodies of the victims, the crematorium of the city being overwhelmed.

300 dead in Lombardy alone

There were more than 300 additional deaths in Lombardy alone, where the province of Bergamo is located, the most affected with more than 4,000 cases of contamination. Italy has imposed containment on its population and, in the face of an ever-increasing toll, Council President Giuseppe Conte said that these restrictions would be extended beyond April 3.

The images of army trucks evacuating corpses illustrate the disruption that the Italian health system seems to be achieving, particularly in the northern regions of the country that have been the hardest hit.

Giacomo Angeloni, head of the cemeteries in Bergamo, said this week that the city's crematorium was in continuous operation, cremating 24 bodies a day, almost twice the maximum usually expected, and that it could not keep up with this pace . As the morgues overflow, the benches in the crematorium chapel have been removed to make room, but more coffins are arriving every day.

The Governor of Lombardy, Attilio Fontana, said that doctors and nurses in hospitals in the region were exhausted. "I am worried about the possibility that they may succumb physically and psychologically because if they succumb, it would really be a disaster," Attilio Fontana told Radio Capital.

Extremely low death rates in Germany

At the same time, Germany has a large number of patients, but an extremely low mortality rate: the mystery remains regarding the German exception to the epidemic of the new coronavirus.

With officially 10,999 cases listed Thursday for 20 deaths, the fatality rate is established in the country at only 0.18%, against some 4% in China or Spain, 2.9% in France, even 8.3% in Italy.

"It's difficult to unravel (...) We have no real answer and it's probably a combination of different factors," admitted this week Richard Pebody, head of the World Health Organization (WHO). ).

Here are the main hypotheses put forward by the specialists:

Best medical equipment. With 25,000 intensive care beds with respiratory assistance, Germany is particularly well equipped compared to its European neighbors. France has around 7,000 and Italy around 5,000. Berlin also announced Wednesday to double this number in hospitals in the coming weeks. Sick patients can so far be quickly followed and the country does not fear, in the immediate future, that its hospitals are saturated, as is the case for example in Italy or in the East of France.

However, this explanation does not seem significant enough to explain the difference in the number of deaths in the first weeks, when its European neighbors also mobilized their hospitals. However, this point could weigh in the coming months if the crisis worsens.

Early tests. "We recognized the disease here in our country very early on: we are ahead in terms of diagnosis and detection," says Christian Drosten, director of the Institute of Virology at the Charity Hospital in Berlin.

This criterion, associated with the large territorial network of independent laboratories in Germany which as early as January - when the number of positive cases was still very low - began to test people, would have allowed the country's doctors to better diagnose the disease and to exclude in quarantine the cases most at risk.

These numerous laboratories increase screening capacity, estimated at around 12,000 per day by the Robert Koch Institute (IRK), which is piloting the fight against the epidemic. Getting tested in Germany remains complicated but, according to experts, simpler than in other countries: the appearance of symptoms coupled with contact with a confirmed case or a person returning from a risk zone are enough.

A young population affected. "In Germany, more than 70% of the people who have been identified as infected so far are between 20 and 50 years old," said the president of the IRK. The disease first spread mainly in a relatively young and healthy population, less aware of the risks of coronavirus because it was not the population most at risk.

Like the Scandinavians, the first infected Germans returned to the country after being infected during a ski trip in Italy or Austria. However, this remains a sign that the epidemic is still in its infancy in Germany. With nearly 25% of its population aged over 60, according to the Statista Institute, the country fears that the number of its deaths will increase sharply in the coming days.

Absence of post-mortem tests. Another explanation, put forward in particular on the Italian side to understand the difference in mortality, is the absence in Germany of post-mortem coronavirus tests on deceased people. "We do not consider post-mortem tests to be a decisive factor. We assume that patients are diagnosed before they die," defends AFP the IRK.

However, these tests are well performed in France for example. Concretely, this means that when a person dies in quarantine at home and not in hospital, there is a good chance that his case does not go into the statistics, which was astonished Giovanni Maga, director from the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the National Research Council in Pavia (Italy) in an interview with Euronews.

With AFP and Reuters

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