COVID-19 in other countries

We didn't really have a flu season this year - lots of people who would normally have died from seasonal influenza, didn't.

 

Wow. What a debilitating condition - a Scottish accent. At least it wasn't permanent. They obviously found a cure for it.

 

Of course. The medical bills to cure that condition would have been huge.

 

We had that flu strain in Australia in 2019 - it was one of our worst flu seasons ever (2017 being the worst).

Road deaths are pretty low in Australia compared to many other countries - NSW had 292 deaths in 2020 up until the 23rd Dec compared to 346 deaths the year before (noting that the downward trend in numbers was already established prior to the start of 2020).

According to Road Deaths Australia—Monthly Bulletins ... Australia overall saw a decline in road deaths in 2020 (about 5% down on previous year), but that wasn't consistent across all states. Victoria saw nearly 20% decline in road deaths (no doubt partly due to their strict lockdowns), while Queensland actually saw a 22% increase in road deaths.

There were 740 deaths on our roads from Apr - Nov 2020.

Note the 25% increase in cyclist deaths - no doubt related to the massive growth in cycling in Australia since lockdowns started early in 2020.



According to Fatality statistics | Safe Work Australia ... YTD 2019 saw 173 workplace deaths in Australia compared to YTD 2020 with 158 ... about an 8% reduction

It would be difficult to extrapolate these numbers to any other country - all countries are different in their demographics, how they move about, workplace safety rules, COVID response, etc.

 

The number of times I've nearly hit a food delivery driver while driving along Hampden Rd in Artarmon is quite alarming. They have zero road sense!

 

I saw one crossing diagonally, weaving through moving traffic, across four lanes of busy Ann Street, Fortitude Valley in peak hour. I saw him out of the corner of my eye and wasn't close to hitting him, but had I not noticed him, possibly I could have been involved in an incident. These bicycle delivery people take huge risks, for probably a pittance in wages.

 

Russia admits that its death toll is three times worse than previously reported (55,265 to 186,000), tripling the previous official toll and making it the third worst death toll worldwide.
Russia admits its COVID-19 death toll is three times higher than reported, making it world's third-worst outbreak

I'm sure they aren't alone in underreporting.

 

Have ‘t read it as I’m on my phone without reading glasses. Does it give a reason for the under reporting?

 

They said that they had previously only reported deaths which were confirmed as coronavirus from am autopsy.

It had apparently been suspicious that the death rate was much lower than that of other countries.

Sure enough. Wuhan may have had ten times the number of people infected than had been reported.

 

The first wave of deaths saw what I believe to be an average of around 3 - 3.5% of deaths per case.

Now that we've become more proficient at treating the ill and understand the risks to the elderly, these latest waves seem to be more around the 1.5% deaths per case.

Which is why Australia is stuck so high up the list - most of our deaths were in the first wave and so our 3.21% death rate was average (actually quite a bit below average), but now that we've basically got very few new cases (mostly imported) and very few deaths (only 2 deaths in the past few months and both from elderly people who contracted the disease in May-Jul), our death rate is far higher than it should be.

In hindsight, it would probably be more meaningful to report deaths per case on a rolling 30 day basis rather than an overall figure.

A few European countries who seem to be pretty consistent in their reporting are around the 1.5% level right now. The US is currently at 1.73%

Russia is at 1.79% - I'm sure to be reporting a higher death rate than the US is very galling to the Russian leadership. The problem is that if they really do have more deaths than reported, then they also probably have far more cases than reported too. Either that, or their health outcomes really are far worse than that of the US, which is just as bad. Either way - Russia does not come out of this looking very good.

I would suggest that most countries reporting less than 1% deaths per case are either not accurately reporting deaths - or have a very poor handle on the health status of their population.

There are exceptions to this - specifically Singapore, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain - where I believe it is more demographics that helped keep their numbers low (younger part of the "working" population who got infected and thus had a high survivability rate).

Excluding these 4, there are 26 countries with a death rate of under 1%