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This is how Wolfgang Wodarg, MD, answers question about the situation in Italy:
COVID19 in Italy? (translated with https://www.deepl.com/translator)
Frequent question:
How can the drama of the many intensive care patients and deaths in Italy (before that also in China) be explained? Doctors in Italy do not have enough space in the intensive care units and have to send elderly people home to die, one reads. Doesn't this go beyond the flu waves of the past years? Or is it due to the poor quality of the healthcare system? Or is it just a publication of death figures that have not been published in this way in recent years? But where does this short-term massaging come from?
Answer:
Thank you very much for your questions. I can imagine that in Italy, at the time of the flu season, the conditions in the hospitals become problematic. Unfortunately I have no possibility to compare what is reported this year with the situations of previous years.
What you can see from the above very recent statistics is that there are no more people dying in Italy this flu season than usual.
In order to answer your questions, you would have to do some research:
A.: Questions about the baseline (annual average) and possible secondary interests of the reporters.
How many hospital beds per inhabitant are there in the regions to be compared?
What was the bed occupancy rate in the previous year?
How has the incidence of acute respiratory diseases in Italy developed this winter compared to previous years?
Is there a shortage of outpatients, so that people are increasingly forced to use hospitals?
Do the promised European financial aid for Italian hospitals play a role in the media coverage of the situation by individual hospitals?
How high is the rate of nosocomial respiratory tract infections in the hospitals in focus compared to others? (A much higher rate of antibiotic resistance is known)
Is it true that hospital care in regions of Italy has been causing problems for some time? (staff, ventilation places, etc?)
B.: Questions on possible distortion of the facts due to incorrect or selective recording of cases
There is evidence, for example, that the COVID19 test is used selectively in Italy where there is a particularly high incidence of seriously ill people.
Here is an explanation:
If I were to apply 1000 COVID19 tests in schools or companies to people who say they have a cold, I would find corona viruses in five people, for example. If the "new" corona viruses are really so important this season, I would have to find them.
If I as a doctor were to examine 1000 people in my practice who have acute respiratory problems (ARE), I would probably find considerably more cases (e.g. 15 "positives"), because only people who seek help because they cannot cope with the disease on their own come to the practice.
If I do 1000 tests in the emergency room of a clinic on all patients with acute respiratory problems, I have to expect that up to 15% of the tests will be positive, that would be 150 cases.
With a limited number of tests available (1000 in this case), the larger the proportion of patients who show clinically severe symptoms of ARE, the more cases I will find.
When I know that the mortality rate of severe pneumonia patients treated with intensive care is 20-30% in most countries, the alarmist reports from Italy appear in a different light.
The Berlin Tagesspiegel reported:
"Italy also tests post-mortem for coronavirus
It is certain that Italy is by far the country with the highest number of people tested for coronavirus in Europe - and post-mortem tests have also been carried out since the first Covid 19 disease appeared on 20th February. An analysis of the first 104 deaths has shown that more than two thirds of those examined have suffered from at least two more or less life-threatening previous diseases.
In addition, it is known from studies in children that corona viruses were particularly often detected together with other ARE viruses. It is then difficult to judge which pathogen was the more dangerous.
