Took em long enough. Look at their mortality rate among those with the virus.
6650 Confirmed cases
335 Deaths
Compared to:
USA
42964 Cases
524 Deaths
Germany
29056 Cases
123 Deaths
Italy - just off the charts
63927 Cases
6077 Deaths
Idiot radio presenter was going through those numbers this morning. Stating percentage death rates just based on those numbers. Was grinding my teeth at his dumbness.
Why is it that journalists do less research and think less about a topic than do random people on the internet? It was so obvious this was the first time the guy had even thought about the issue.
Clearly you can't simply look at 'deaths/cases' because it all depends on how rigourous the testing is in any given country, plus how assiduous they are at ascribing deaths, plus which part of the population the virus is currently circulating in, plus you have to allow for the time-lag between infection and outcome.
For example, apparently Italy tends to ascribe anyone who dies in hospital _with_ the virus, as a virus-related death. Whereas Germany is much more conservative about stating 'cause of death', and may not even test for the virus in all cases where someone with known serious conditions dies. Italy may thus be slightly overstating the number of deaths actually caused by the virus, while Germany is possibly understating it.
It could also be that in Germany the young and old are more segregated and have less contact with each other than they do in Italy, and so far the virus in Germany hasn't started circulating in the elderly population.
But who knows? There _might_ be some real meaning in those different ratios, but you can't just take them as if they represent the real situation without further analysis.
The whole thing is a confusing mess, statistically.
Bloody obvious to me, however, that Boris's government has not been doing enough and has been in a constant state of reacting to events and didn't have a proper plan from the start. What annoys me is that early on we were told the 'behvioural psychologists' of the 'Nudge Unit' were in charge. For behavioural psychologists they have turned out to be spectacularly useless at actually forecasting people's behaviour - from the failure of appeals to voluntary 'social distancing' to the failure to predict the panic-buying and the consequences of that.
Which does fit with my general pet peeve that 'psychology is not a science'.