That's not all there is to it, since the number of people infected grew at a similar pace in the early phase of an outbreak in different countries.
For example, the number of people infected in France and Germany is rising in near perfect synchrony, but France has 11 deaths now. Similarly, growth in the early phase of the South Korea outbreak looks nearly identical to Germany and France (with a ca. 2 week delay), and they had 10 deaths when they had 1000 infected.
Germany is looking increasingly anomalous every day.
There has to be a difference with respect to detection, unless it's something more out there like viral strain differences.
Actually, to the point of viral strain differences, I did come across this paper indicating exactly that idea— that there are two strains. I am not a scientist, so I cannot evaluate the veracity of the claims, but did find the work interesting and compelling:
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr...
79 cases last week to 1000 today doesn't indicate that there's been a new outbreak this week; it indicates that there's been an outbreak for a while and they're just now noticing. Those 79 people alone couldn't have infected 1000.
That, and with Christmas still in living memory the endangered age bracket is effectively quarantined anyways, not expecting the the next quarterly visit from children and grandchildren before the end of the month. Germany is a country of lonely old people.
