Official daily Covid deaths in Germany more than doubled in October. On October 9, it was 67/day; then it doubled within a week, and has been around 140-150/day up until a week ago. At the same time, official daily new cases dropped dramatically, from 80,300 to 24,000 – meaning that the home testing kicked in big-time and very little of the spread is being reported. The tripling of Covid hospitalizations in October over September also speaks to the irrelevance of the official count of new Covid cases.
Epidemiologists fear that the two new subvariants that hit Germany, entitled BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, are ready to break out elsewhere. Both subvariants exhibit high immune escape, so that even the recently recovered and the fully vaccinated can become infected with the virus. Further, an early study on BQ.1.1, reported last week, indicates that current treatments are ineffective. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/11/221123113700.htm
BQ.1.1 is showing up now in the US and Europe, starting small but with a demonstrated ability to spread rapidly. In late October, Friedemann Weber, director of the Institute of Virology at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, told Focus magazine that BQ.1.1 is “the fastest-growing virus variant in Germany at the moment. While its share of cases is relatively small and BA.5 remains dominant, that may soon change, as the BQ1.1 curve is much steeper.”
Even more worrisome, the 3,500 or so deaths in October attributed to COVID-19, may be only the tip of the iceberg. Germany’s official statistics, from a Nov. 14 report by destatis, show that mortality levels in October were 19% higher than the median average for each of the previous three Octobers (2019, 2020, and 2021). That translates to 14-15,000 extra deaths, or about four times what is attributed to deaths from COVID-19. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/11/PE22_480_126.html
However, as of the beginning of November, German politicians seemed more inclined to look the other way. Here’s a sampling:
