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In recent weeks, in some of the main countries, coronavirus infections have reached figures never before recorded since the start of the pandemic: this is the case in France and Spain, where more cases have been discovered every day for a month than those verified in weeks. worse than the epidemic, between the end of March and the beginning of April. The arrival of the “second wave” in these countries is evident, and the curve of the United Kingdom also shows an alarming trend, where the highest number of new daily cases was registered on Thursday. The situation forced the governments of France, Spain and the United Kingdom to re-enact strict restrictive measures, after the general relaxation of the summer.
In Italy and Germany, on the other hand, the figures are much lower and are not considered emergency for the moment, although they raise widespread concern. In Sweden, a country that distinguishes itself from the others by never having applied emergency shutdown, on the other hand, infections seem to have stabilized more, after peaking in the summer weeks late compared to other European countries.
During the last seven days, France and Spain have registered a number of new cases discovered in a single day that has been higher than what Italy registers weekly. In France, 16,096 were determined Thursday; in Spain, 13,000 have been exceeded on several occasions in the last ten days. In the UK, the record set on Thursday is 6,634 cases. Italy has not exceeded 2,000 cases since last April 29.
However, there is a big difference from the situation this spring: 1,000 infections discovered today are not the same as 1,000 infections discovered in March, and it is well understood when looking at the trend of deaths of people who had contracted the coronavirus in different countries .
Major European countries peaked in daily deaths between late March and early April, when Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and France recorded between 800 and 1,100 deaths days. Today, even in those countries where infections have reached figures higher than those of that period, daily deaths are much lower and have never exceeded 100.
It is a phenomenon with different causes: hospitals are able to manage the flow of patients much better, which in general is less because fewer people have serious clinical conditions; care has improved and health professionals have more experience; and above all, today we discover a much higher percentage of real infections.
In fact, in more or less all countries, health systems have increased the capacity to test and trace contacts, although there is great criticism about how health monitoring works, especially in Spain and the United Kingdom. It has long been said that in the weeks of greatest emergency, tested positives were only a portion of people who had contracted the coronavirus: today it certainly remains the case, but this percentage has risen significantly.
However, a steady increase in the number of deaths is evident almost everywhere, with the exception of Sweden: but if in Italy and Germany it is still very early, in Spain, France and the United Kingdom it has started for weeks.
This can be understood, among other things, in the graph that shows the number of daily deaths for every 100 new infections discovered. At present, this number is, for all the main European countries, below 1: but until the beginning of the summer the situation was very different and the relationship between deaths and discovered cases was much higher.
This is the question of apparent fatality and actual fatality: in the spring, official data on COVID-19 in Europe suggested fatality rates, that is, the percentage of people who died compared to those who were sick, very high , different from what science considered more likely: because at that time, there were many more people who were really sick, including the asymptomatic, than health systems could detect with the tests. It is also true that thousands of deaths from COVID-19 in each country have never entered the official statistics, because they have never been proven. But in any case the patients who escaped the surveys were proportionally many more.
As we know, the number of infections discovered is directly related to the tests carried out. Comparing this number between different countries is not always easy, because some disseminate data on the number of tests carried out, others on the number of people examined: and the first is always significantly higher than the second. Therefore, countries should be compared on the basis of the same indicator and also on the basis of the number of inhabitants. The graph shows how well the number of tests has increased overall, with the UK and France currently performing significantly more tests than other countries. Italy, on the other hand, is the one that does the least.
Instead, the following map shows the percentage of tests that are positive of the total of those carried out, with a color ranging from dark blue for the countries that discover fewer positives to red for those that discover more, every 100 swabs. Assuming that the selection of people to be tested is more or less effective in the same way in the main European countries, a blue color suggests that the trend of the epidemic is more controlled, while red can mean that they are escaping from statistics. more people infected (and indeed in March and April it was red or orange across Europe).
It can be seen that Italy, despite the lower number of tests, continues to discover a percentage of positives below 3% of the tests carried out, while in France it has been above 6% for about ten days, and in Spain even above 10%. The UK, precisely because it is doing so many tests, has a percentage below 2%.
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