You can't draw truly accurate conclusions from this sort of data....however they are meaningful guides. I'd firstly suggest not confusing 'having CoVid' with 'running a test' or 'attributing death to CoVid'. If you just look at the last measure (fatalities...either as a raw number or as a percentile... a la 'deaths per thousand (million) etc' bear in mind the many significant variables;
- Some nations include deaths from hospitals only, others include nursing homes, whilst others offer a broader base
- Many hospital systems allow a single 'cause of death' to be reported. So how do you record whether the person died from CoVid, or from their underlying hypertension, or obesity, etc etc
- Many political systems may deliberately intervene - as they want statistics to defend and support their own policies (whether to lock down, whether to open up, etc). More authoritarian governments get better 'compliance'
- Many hospital systems may intentionally misrepresent - believe you me there's gold in them rivers (i.e funding attached to matters like CoVid). Hospitals will often behave in the manner that accrues greatest funding
- Many individual health practitioners may even deliberately misrepresent (for their own political reasons, or above funding reasons) or misrecord data
There are also issues of competency, capability, capacity, etc etc etc. Policy is probably the biggest variable (whether you record deaths only in hospitals, or - in the case of North Korea - you simply tell your citizens that they must not catch or die from CoVid, which has been remarkably successful, and Kim is to be applauded) - as is capability (I'm sure in Afghanistan it may be problematic to record accurate statistics).
And - even the issue of timing (dead people inside houses during lockdown).
So....you can use these data sources to show trends (as I alluded to the other day, a clear trend between northern and southern hemisphere fatalities).....but don't expect them to be masterful records of actual events.
On the topic of difference / parallels between UK and Germany...ahem...the rest of the world does not see a huge disparity in your population density. My guess is Germany is twice the size, but with 55% more people? Given either end of these extremes - say India at one end and Australia the other - I'd see density, land mass, population, - even ethnic composition as vaguely similar between the two.
But it does seem that there is a material difference between fatality rates (rates, not raw numbers) in Germany vs the UK, and it is curious as to why that may be. As some have pointed out, UK should be in a more desirable position as it has less porous borders. Those porous borders worked well early on for Adolf.....but in theory should not help in a pandemic.
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