Munich infections are on the rise, and journalists are certain that Oktoberfest is to blame – even though the case numbers are totally in line with broader regional trends.
eugyppius
The first Oktoberfest since the start of the pandemic draws to a close today, and the press are falling all over themselves to blame rising infections on all that partying and carrying on in densely packed tents:
Two weeks after the start of the Oktoberfest … the Corona numbers in Munich are high, as feared: The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reports an incidence of 768.7 for the city of Munich on Sunday. …
On Saturday, the city of Munich reported 12,412 Corona cases in the past seven days. It is not known how many were infected at Oktoberfest or in the vicinity ...
The Federal Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach (SPD), commented on the increase in incidence in Munich during the Oktoberfest season via Twitter: “This would not have been necessary if self-tests had been conducted prior to admission. Given the price of the beer, an additional 2–3 Euros would hardly have mattered.”
The Munich health officer Beatrix Zurek (SPD) assumes that the actual infection figures are “four to five times higher” than reported. This is because the RKI statistics only include as “cases” those infections which are confirmed by PCR. The number of unreported cases is high, says Zurek, because not everyone who has symptoms also takes a PCR test. The proportion of patients in intensive care units in Munich with Covid-19, however, remains low – it is 7.28 per cent, according to information from the DIVI intensive care register on Sunday … According to these numbers, 30 people are currently in intensive care with the virus, compared to 23 on Friday. 384 of the 422 intensive care beds in Munich are currently occupied.
In the whole of Bavaria, the incidence on Sunday was 692.5 and thus slightly higher than on Friday (654.8). Here, too, the figures will not be up to date until the middle of next week due to subsequent reports by the health authorities.
There is a greater and a lesser point to be made here. The lesser, is that if infections are four to five times higher than reported (and they are certainly at least that much higher), then Corona has truly become a complete nothingburger and we should all forget about it. That would mean, very roughly, an ICU admission rate of at most 0.15%, and an infection fatality rate that seems very hard to differentiate from zero. Omicron has become just another human-infecting coronavirus, in other words, which might be one reason that it seems to have replaced them:
CONTINUE READING
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-myth-of-the-mass-infection-event