Flatter corona curve: how certain are the numbers?
Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.
More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.The lockdown light is intended to break the second wave of corona infections in Germany. The good news is: The number of those who tested positive is increasing much more slowly than it was two weeks ago. However, the numbers should be read with caution. Because there are likely to be more undiscovered cases.
Follow-up gaps
One possible reason for this is the current overload of the health authorities. If they cannot keep up with tracking the chains of infection, many cases go undetected. Currently, in three out of four cases, it is not possible to determine where an infected person was infected. This also means that the transmitted numbers are becoming increasingly blurred.
Overloaded laboratories
To make matters worse, there are still many untested samples dormant in the overloaded laboratories. How many of them are positive is open. In the meantime, more and more people only receive their test results when they are hardly contagious.
Changed test strategy
In view of the overloading of the laboratories and the temporary shortage of the material required for the tests, the Robert Koch Institute recently changed its test recommendations. Testing should no longer be done with every cold, but primarily with severe symptoms (e.g. pneumonia or fever) or particularly typical corona signs, such as loss of the sense of taste and smell.
People who belong to a risk group or who have a lot of social contacts should continue to be tested with mild symptoms. People with high-risk exposure to infected people are also tested, even if they have no symptoms.
More positive tests
The proportion of positive test results in the total number of tests is still increasing. It is now 7.88 percent. Two weeks earlier it was only 5.51 percent. This is likely due to the changed test strategy. But it also means that the number of unreported infected people is probably higher than before. The actual number of infections could therefore increase more than the curve of new infections based on tests suggests.
The lockdown cannot take effect yet
In any case, the observed flattening of the curve is not yet due to the new restrictions that came into force at the beginning of November. Due to the time window between the day of infection, the onset of symptoms and finally testing of the infected, they should not affect the values until next week at the earliest.
The fact that the numbers are already falling could, among other things, be due to the fact that the discussion about the worsening situation has already motivated people to change their behavior. Similar effects had already been observed before the first lockdown in spring.
The trend reversal has not yet been achieved
Regardless of how high the number of unreported corona infected people actually is, there is no reason to give the all-clear. The numbers are still very high and the trend has not been reversed. The proportion of older people in the infection rate who is most threatened by the virus is higher. More and more retirement homes are already reporting outbreaks. And the number of beds occupied by Covid-19 patients is higher than ever before in the pandemic. It has doubled to more than 3,000 within two weeks.
Keep going!
So stay tuned is the motto. The rule of thumb is that the number of social contacts must be reduced by three quarters so that the number of infections can be controlled again. Since schools and daycare centers remain open, this demands greater restraint in other areas of society. RKI boss Lothar Wieler expressed this in his own way and asked the population to "pinch their buttocks" for a few more months and to adhere to the rules.
In the run-up to the new contact restrictions, the value of the weekly new infections had risen rapidly since the end of September. In six weeks it had increased almost tenfold. Most recently, according to the RKI, 21,866 new cases were added on Wednesday (11/11/2020) compared to the previous day.
