There has been a debate about the low Covid-19 mortality in Germany, especially when looking at Italy. I could not make sense myself of the Italian numbers, even I was playing around with Bayes Theorem trying to sort out the effects of preconditions and Covid-19. One disaster the Italians have to suffer is the shortage of ventilators and intensive care beds. Some say: “This can never happen in Germany”, and think the measures of public life shutdown are overdone. Well, don’t be too sure about that. Let me just do a quick estimate, in a “do-nothing scenario” when Germany would run out of ventilators in intensive care - not a scientific one, but like I would do it in a job interview.
We have 30 000 ventilator places and are able to install as of today 50 more daily. 50 % of these places could be made available for Covid-19 patients. About 5 % of these patients need approximately a week of ventilation in intensive care. Total infections are going up exponentially and we are today at 22672 confined positive (as of the Robert Koch Institut). If you approximate the total infections in Germany by day with an exponential curve, this fits into the last 23 days with a Pearson coefficient of 0.82. Please download the excel sheet by clicking here. By the way, I am doing there the trick with a coordinate transformation, then a linear regression and then re-transform. If we say doomsday is the day we cannot supply every patient in need with a ventilator, then this is next week on April 3rd, which is Friday. Just 3 weeks later we would have an absolute disaster over 30 000 patients without intensive care ventilation. Now you may argue about the numbers in some details, and maybe some are not too exact. But generally what we have is an exponential curve of patients crossing a linear one of increased ventilator capacity. So, it does not really matter to argue about the digits. Unless we break the exponential growth, as China did it before us, we will be in a mess. There are different approaches around in doing so. But we now picked one, which makes sense and let’s see how it goes next week Friday.
Four Horsemen of Apocalypse (1887) by Viktor Vasnetsov (Copyright: public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apocalypse_vasnetsov.jpg)