Coronavirus Commentary

There was a virus expert to come out in Germany in the past day.....to say that roughly 278,000 Germans will die from the Coronavirus.

He (Christian Drosten, 'Chief' of the Charité Institute of Virology) assumes that roughly two-thirds of all Germans (83-million) will come down with the virus, and x-number will pass on.

I sat and read through the Focus article on this.  Mathematically, he might be correct.  I suspect the death rates that you've seen in Wuhan....won't be the death rates to be seen in Germany. 

The rates in Italy?  Yesterday (5 Mar), the WHO reported Italy had 3,089 folks with the virus and 107 dead.  They haven't made the numbers clear enough to say that the majority of the 107 are over the age of 65, or had prior conditions.....so you can't draw a lot of conclusions.

Japan's numbers?  317 infected, and only six dead.  Same issue here.....you don't know the ages or the prior conditions of the six.  Some of those Japan infections relate back to that cruise ship that docked several weeks ago, so it's not a 'pure' Japanese 'count'. 

IF 278k Germans were to die?  I would admit that it'd be a fairly unsettling number and cause a lot of public frustration/grief.  You could have some professions harshly hit (like doctors, or medical specialists......or railway engineers).  Out of the 278k, you might even expect a dozen-odd Bundestag members to pass on (a fair number of them are over the age of 65).