Analyzing the Low Death Rate in Germany

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: But can I ask you just quickly about the statistics? You did have a much lower death rate. I’m going to try to find the figures on this. Your death rate is at about 1.9 percent versus 12.8 percent in Italy, 12.7 percent here in the U.K. I wonder how you account for that. And also, we have to say that within the last 24 hours, your statistics show that you’ve had about 315 deaths. Can you explain to us, you sort of said testing and social distancing, but what made you so way ahead of the testing, for instance? Which is a huge controversy here in the United States, in many places. It’s not nearly sufficient.

JENS SPAHN, GERMAN HEALTH MINISTER: Well, we had a big chance of huge testing capacities from the very beginning actually. And that gave us a chance to detect what’s going on, to get a really good picture of the epidemic situation here in Germany, from the beginning, to see the mild and asymptomatic cases, as well. And these are important to really see and to know what’s going on. And with this testing capacities from the beginning, that was already a big advantage. And then we traditionally, actually, have big ICU capacities here in Germany. And we even manage to increase them by postponing, for example, elective operations and elective treatments in hospitals. We asked hospitals to postpone mid of March. And meanwhile, we have 10,000 empty ICU beds here in Germany. We were able to actually treat all patients with ventilation that needed it. And I’m very happy that actually we made this together, with the health care workers and the hospitals here in Germany. So, our biggest chance, actually, and opportunity was to take it very serious from the beginning, to know from the beginning, what’s going on in the country and to prepare as good as possible.