Streuspanne – Our blog on statistics and Jurojin

Recently, we looked at the extent to which incomplete infection figures in the Corona pandemic can be compared with warranty data for vehicle components. Today, we use statistical quality control to reject some conspiracy theories surrounding Covid-19.

In the last post we presented a simple approach that can be used to statistically estimate the dark figure of corona infections (with regard to SARS-CoV-2). We originally developed the approach to explain at least a large part of the very different mortality rates between Italy and Germany (and less to estimate the number of unreported cases as precisely as possible). At the same time, the approach has aroused great interest among many readers and colleagues. We have therefore decided to develop the approach further so that it can estimate the dark figure even better.

On 2 April, Germany reported 73,000 corona infections and 867 deaths. Italy counts 100,000 infections and 12,000 deaths. Based on these figures, the case mortality rate in Italy is more than 10 times higher than in Germany. Experts are clear: this difference is less an expression of a different health care system or a different population structure, but rather an expression of unknown dark figures.