An early detection campaign has kept the death toll at a relatively low level across the Rhine since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic.
Christian Drosten, one of the figures in the fight against coronavirus in Germany, head of the virology department at the Charité public hospital in Berlin, is the one who as early as January sounded the alarm and alerted the authorities of his country. Chancellor Angela Merkel has been consulting him regularly and very early on engaged her country in a large-scale testing strategy.
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“That’s the reason, he says, for which Germany has so few deaths compared to the number of people infected. We very early and massively did a lot of laboratory diagnostics. We do about half a million tests every week. “
A very high figure which drops the mortality rate of infected people to 0.5%, but this strategy mainly allows to isolate those tested positive (about 10%), and to quickly test those around them to limit the spread. The German government wants to intensify this strategy: up to 100,000 tests per day in mid-April, 200,000 at the end of the month thanks to the launch on the market exclusively for Germany of a rapid test: the result can be given in 2h30 instead of one or two days. A test developed by the medical branch of the German company Bosch.
