No kissing on cheeks generally. Fewer catholics - holy bread, holy water etc. It explains why the disease it's not so successful in the northern European countries.
This is an incorrect calculation. One should not look at the total number of cases, but only at the cases which already had an outcome. You should only look at the people who recovered, versus the people who did not recover and died. We don't know yet the fate of the patients who still suffer from the disease. I'm looking now, at the moment of writing this, at Germany's statistics at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/ and see that of the almost 25 k cases 360 had an outcome. 266 recovered while 94 died. Those numbers put the death rate in a different perspective. Both China and Korea are further ahead in handling their patients. The number of ongoing cases is declining. In those countries you see a death rate of 4% and 3% respectively.
Nah, your recovered vs died argument is also not logical. If anything you should look at the "critical stage" figure. Germany has 23 critical cases out of 26000 cases, while spain has almost 1800 critical out of 30000 cases. I'm not sure the total recovered is accurately reported anyway. It's really about the time this pandemic has been around together with the total cases around (per country that is). I'm sure there's an estimated "projected time" per person from getting the disease to going critical and dying from it and it should be similar all around. Italy has the oldest population in Europe. Also, the siesta nad manjana people are much less disciplined to deal with the virus. Germany on the other hand is all about efficiency.
Yeah, you could be on to something there. Germany seems to be able to track patients in a very early stage, when their symptoms are still mild, compared to other countries. When the point of detection is later, and the symptoms are worse, is recovery also a more complicated and lengthy process.
I was simply thinking that the patient profile is different and the relative time it takes to handle the patient is much slower in Italy/Spain than in Germany.
I think that it is too early to draw a conclusion like that. Based on experience in Asia, recovery of patients seems to take about 2 to 6 weeks. The epidemic isn't long enough present yet in European countries to already make statements on how quickly patients recover in those countries. It only started in earnest in the first week of March. So we would need another month or so before we can say something on how fast patients recover, and be able to compare countries.