So about this Corona virus: how did WE do and how did THEY do? While scientists agree it is much, much too early to say, politicians the world over are taking the opportunity to claim the supremacy of their country’s approach or even of their ideology.

But it is indeed much too early to claim victory for any approach. At the very least, we’ll have to wait what alleviation of the restrictive measures will bring and if any country will experience a ‘second wave’ of infections once the economy and society have returned back to normal. At the moment, we do not even know if having been ill from this virus confers any immunity from later attacks. We don’t even know whether having been severely ill and hospitalised brings on the same effects as having been only slightly ill – cases which were usually not even diagnosed. Yet on these questions depends much of the effectivity of the various strategies.
There is also the question of when a vaccine will be available. If it arrives in time to prevent a second wave, those opting for the most rigorous clamp-down may be proven right, but if not, it’s a different story: when a vaccine is still a year or so away, it just may turn out that those very rigorous measures only lead to a population which is vulnerable to a second or third wave of attack.
Even when we will know, maybe in a couple of years, what the best strategy would have been, it won’t be easy to draw conclusions for the future since there will be much that worked out better only ‘in hindsight’ and should not be applied as a general rule. For instance, what we know about surviving a viral attack is that it usually alerts the defences of the immune system in a semi-permanent way, that is: you are, to a certain extend, immune for the virus afterwards. Many based their strategies on this: protecting vulnerable people while building up ‘group immunity’ through relaxed constraints for young & healthy people who can survive the virus without too much discomfort. Yet it may be that it doesn’t work like that for this particular virus. Thus, it may be that in this case it turns out that these strategies are proven wrong. But is that a reason to call the ‘group immunity’ strategy ‘wrong’ and to adopt a different strategy in the future? I think not; not by itself, anyway.

The EU

For a very long time there hasn’t been so much bickering within the EU as now over this virus, with countries publicly accusing others (e.g. their neighbours) of ‘weak government’ or even ‘dangerous negligence’. That, in my opinion, is mainly of not wholly political propaganda.
The first thing to point out here is that all scientific advisors stress, time and again, that restrictive measures do not do anything by themselves; it’s all about compliance. And all of them realise that strict enforcement of these measures can’t last for very long – and what will happen afterwards? In other words, it’s all about educating people and getting broad support for any restrictive measures. We, in the EU, have always been staunch supporters of a federal model which leaves plenty of space for the great cultural differences among the member states. And thus, we shouldn’t be surprised at the different messages the leaders bestow upon their populace.
Yes, there are real differences in ‘strategy’, but a lot of the differences the media make a lot of fuss about boils down to adaptations to cultural differences, or even simply differences in wording, while in fact the underlying strategies are not different at all.

Belgium and The Netherlands

The Dutch government has been heavily criticised by the Belgium government for not taking this crisis seriously enough and not doing enough. Belgium completely closed the borders with The Netherlands. Indeed, there are some differences in the advice given by government and the measures taken:

	Belgium	Netherlands
Advice to thoroughly wash hands	Yes	Yes
Obligation to keep 1,5m distance	Yes	Yes
Schools closed	Yes	Yes
Restaurants and pubs closed	Yes	Yes
No groups in public places	Yes	Yes
No public events	Yes	Yes
Appeal to work from home	Yes	Yes
Closing of non-essential shops	Yes	No
Borders closed	Yes	No
Children can’t play together	Yes	No
Can’t sit on a bench in a park	Yes	No
Can’t go out of the house without urgent reason	Yes	No

 

But now for the statistics. Reliable statistics are hard to come by at the best of times, but in cases like this there are additional factors which make a comparison between countries very difficult. The much talked-about figure of ‘Deaths due to the Covid-9 virus’, for instance, heavily depends on whether or not people were tested for the virus and diagnosed. There are many other problems when comparing figures from different countries and health systems, so I think it is – for the moment at least – a better idea to compare like with like and consider trends rather then numbers.

Number of hospitalisations

Comparing Belgium with The Netherlands, a fairly ‘hard’ figure is the number of people admitted to a hospital, for whatever reasons. Take a look at this graph:

The above graph compares absolute figures; I didn’t make the effort of adjusting the graph to reflect the difference in no of inhabitants (The Netherlands has some 17 million inhabitants, Belgium some 11 million), because our two systems do not function in exactly the same way which could conceivably influence the absolute figures. But what is real and undeniable is the trend. The trend is the same in both countries and continues to be so. Clearly, the ‘laxer’ attitude of the Dutch is not reflected in the statistics. For now.

Mortality

Mortality is another statistic which does not depend on testing for ‘Covid-9’. The numbers reflect ‘the number of deaths per week’; for the EU ‘Momo’ or the European Mortality Monitor (https://www.euromomo.eu/) has been assembling the statistics for decades. The table below compares some countries over the past two quarters. Mind: these figures do not reflect ‘Covid-9 deaths’ but simply deaths due to whatever cause.
There is blue and a green line; the difference is fairly complicated and I won’t go into that since my objective is only to signal overall trends. The red line indicates he base line of normal death rates around this time of year.

Belgium
France
Italy
Netherlands
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
England
Germany (Berlin)
Germany (Hesse)

 

The source of these figures does not give any interpretation; just the raw figures, but it seems not a far stretch to connect the obvious peak in March/April the Covid-9 virus. It may be obvious that there is not a great deal of difference between who now accuse each other of ‘lack of control’ or worse, while there is a big difference with notably Germany.

For the time being, it would seem Germany’s mortality rates seem to indicate it did a lot better than their neighbours. That’s in the short run, of course; we’ll have to see how it works out over the years. Nevertheless, the difference in death-rate is striking.
The answer as to ‘why’ may take years to answer, but quite obviously it is not in the severity of the ‘lock-down’ measures; they are not more severe than in neighbouring countries; when compared to Belgium or France even less so: the German borders are not closed and neither are parks etc. The border with The Netherlands remains open, although border officials ‘advise’ people to not cross the border. The train Berlin-Amsterdam runs without any special controls.

Hans

Added 21-4: Lots of articles now appear on “Why is Covid-19 death rate so low in Germany?”, e.g. on CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/24/opinions/germany-low-death-rate-for-coronavirus-sepkowitz/index.html
Lots of explanations are given, but they all seem to avoid the really big question: “Why is the death rate so low in Germany?” No, not the “covid-9 death rate” but simply “the death rate”. Not any explanation involving testing for Covid-9 or counting Covid-9 victims in a different way will do to answer the question “Why doesn’t a peak in mortality show up in Germany?”