Correlation between daily infections and fatality rate due to Covid-19 in Germany

  1. Dieter Mergel

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Abstract

The officially reported daily Covid-19 fatality rate is modelled with a trend line based on a nominal day-to-day reproduction rate and a cosine to take account of weekly fluctuations. Although the time trajectories of officially reported infections and fatalities are pronouncedly different, the reproduction rates obtained therefrom are similar. The long-term effective reproduction rate is around 0.835 and the administrative measures to contain the pandemic seem not to have an immediate reducing effect but well the ease of restrictions an increasing one. The fatality trajectory represented by its trend line can be projected from the number of daily infections by assuming a time lapse between symptom onset and death between 17 and 19 days and a time-dependent nominal lethality. The time trajectory of this lethality increases from 2.5% at March 16 when public life was restricted to 6% within 20 days indicating relatively more infections of vulnerable people. After stipulating face mask wearing at April 27, the nominal lethality decreases down to 1% later in summer. A detailed analysis shows that mask wearing really reduces the number of fatal infections and the officially reported daily infections in May and June are less lethal than before.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.03.20167304: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.08.03.20167304v2 on medRxiv
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.08.03.20167304v1 on medRxiv