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As a foreigner living in Germany I could live with it if there were otherwise sound measures, but it's mostly been a bunch of wishful thinking. There was a rush

• lbj 5y ago
  "open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early" It probably wasn't. There have been 2 major studies on the effects of covid-lockdown measures, they show a small increase in total mortality. So we should have done as the Swedes and kept everything open from beginning to end.
  • howinteresting 5y ago
    Mortality isn't the only negative outcome.
    • bobthechef 5y ago
      Indeed, and the lockdown and other impositions have introduced numerous ills that don't necessarily register, at least not immediately, as deaths.
    • spookthesunset 5y ago
      What about all the negative outcomes from continuing all the restrictions?
      • xg15 5y ago
        Still less severe than long covid, sorry.
        • adolph 5y ago
          Persistence of various symptoms in people who recovered from COVID-19 (collectively called Long COVID) is a major health issue worldwide. It could be due to various mechanisms such as post-intensive care syndrome, post-viral fatigue syndrome, permanent organ damage or others. Proper clinical evaluation will help identify the etiology, and to customize treatment. As the disease is new, it is too early to know the true long-term outlook. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/
          • xg15 5y ago
            Your point being?
            • adolph 5y ago
              I was somewhat skeptical about long covid. The linked article summarizes the known facts well and outlines conjectures for causes.
          • bduerst 5y ago
            That's saying long covid is bad but we don't know just how bad until more time passes.
      • howinteresting 5y ago
        I think mask mandates and ratcheting up the pressure to get vaccinated is a far better use of the "restriction budget" than full lockdowns on the entire population, yes. Lockdowns on people who aren't yet vaccinated by choice seem pretty great to me.
        • spookthesunset 5y ago
    • hogFeast 5y ago
      And lockdowns can cause mortality too. In England, the waiting list for operations (these are procedures that a doctor has determined are required medically, some are elective but England doesn't do many electives because of cost) is expected to hit 12m in a few years...the total adult population in England is 56m. Ignoring the economic turmoil that they cause, ignoring the social turmoil. There are no very good choices. But the high cost of lockdowns should dictate that they only be used when the alternative is extremely large numbers of people dying (at least in the UK, this was probably met at some point last year but hasn't been met for the majority of the Covid period).
      • Pyramus 5y ago
        How many people is "extremely large" in your opinion? And who? Or to put it another way: Would you be okay to go, while we keep everything open? How about your parent, or grand-parent?
        • jseban 5y ago
          Isn't this exactly what measuring excess mortality is for? But it's not reported anymore since there is none, and media has instead shifted to infection rate. If you were old and had little time left, and had a compromised immune system that made any slight infection possibly lethal, and you had the choice to close down society to lower your risk of infection, would you do it?
          • _djo_ 5y ago
            What? There has been significant excess mortality, as summarised here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.
            • jseban 5y ago
              This is exactly the problem, you're using an absolute number without reference "look big number = scary" and you are simply comparing to an average, which doesn't say anything about whether or not this is an unusual or especially different situation. "The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.
    • boringg 5y ago
      You should add Mortality + mortality in the following year. Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.
      • lbj 5y ago
        Interesting, I did not know. Have a source?
        • user764743 5y ago
          https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/01/severe-covid-infection-doubles-chances-of-dying-in-following-year-study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/01/severe-covid-i...
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • JoshuaDavid 5y ago
        > Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year. I'm curious how those studies would disentangle the effect of "COVID damages your health, and severe COVID damages your health more so you're more likely to die in the next year" from the effect of "if you are in worse general health, a COVID infection is more likely to be severe, and also you are more likely to die in the next year". Even if you try to control for factors like age, sex, smoker vs nonsmoker, BMI, etc etc you're likely to miss something. But maybe they did something clever with their control group that serves as a good proxy for "people who would have had severe covid and survived, but didn't get infected". I'm interested to see which study you're referring to.
        • boringg 5y ago
          Agree there are disentangling challenges. However if you think about it logically from a health perspective - if your respiratory system goes under severe stress that will likely exacerbate any respiratory issues that were in your system beforehand. It is surprising that the risk is so great for the following year, but not shocking considering how taxing this disease is on peoples health. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-covid-tied-high-risk-death-mostly-other-causes-within-year https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-c...
    • Eelongate 5y ago
      If the plan is to continue lockdowns until every last hypochondriac stops complaining about 'long covid', then lockdowns will never end. There needs to be a cutoff somewhere.
      • airza 5y ago
        As far as I know, the latest research says that more than half (!) of people experience fatigue and other symptoms after 6 months. I don’t know if lockdowns are the right solution, but if the modal outcome is chronic fatigue than it seems a little flippant to call someone a hypochondriac.
        • arsome 5y ago
          A vague symptom like "fatigue" is also one of the most commonly reported symptoms of placebos.
        • Eelongate 5y ago
          When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place. And anecdotally, every last person I personally know that claims long covid is a person I already knew to be a hypochondriac. I do believe some people will have lingering respiratory problems, as is the case for all viral respiratory illnesses. But I don't think there is much more to it than that, and I think most of the complaints come from the sort of people who always think they have the latest trendy affliction.
          • xg15 5y ago
            > When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place. Source?
            • leesalminen 5y ago
              https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
  • zibzab 5y ago
    Sweden did not keep _everything_ open. We found a sweet spot between "business as usual" and "everybody stays at home". For example, big gatherings and sport events were not allowed. Schools were open only for younger kids.
    • jollybean 5y ago
      And by 'Sweet Spot' we mean a materially higher death rate than immediate peers ... The lockdowns were imminently effective. In Canada, when we had big waves, we shut things down, the wave faded, we opened up gradually, if another wave hit we cloistered again and the numbers came down. If you look at 'Our World in Data' graphs you can see any number of 'spikes' for various countries, most of which were handled with lock-downs, which brought numbers down drastically. Here you go [1] In almost every case when there is a spike up, there are serious measures put in place, and the spike comes down. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases
      • annexrichmond 5y ago
        Lockdowns in Canada were ridiculous, particularly in Ontario. People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes. My parents couldn't drive to their cabin up north in fear of being ticketed. My mom was telling me a story of her colleague's husband who resented her for going to work because he thought she was going to get him killed. Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it drive unnecessary fear? What if it causes more people to disregard rules later on?
        • throw10920 5y ago
          > People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes. If this is true, it's some pretty impressive science denialism - it's pretty obvious that there's an extremely low chance of transmission outdoors (assuming that you're not, you know, breathing right into someone's face, or next to 20k people in a stadium).
          • 5y ago
  • santoshalper 5y ago
    The Swedes wore their masks and got vaccinated. What worked for them would not necessarily have worked for us.
    • rightbyte 5y ago
      > The Swedes wore their masks No such thing happened. Cumulative death per 100k for Sweden in Covid is about 1500, compared to 1750 for France and 1200 for Germany. And far worse then the neighbouring countries. I would not say anything "worked" but rather that the policies were not worse than other bad policies. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~IND~SWE~FRA~DNK https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
      • arthur_sav 5y ago
        Such a relief to live in Sweden. No one is pretending to wear masks and we're doing just fine. If i wasn't reading the news i wouldn't even know there was a pandemic. As opposed to the rest of EU where everyone is pretending to wear masks but only as chin diapers.
        • 13415 5y ago
          You get used to wearing masks very fast and it's no big deal. They can be inconvenient. So what. Independently of the question whether masks are needed or not, it's bizarre and unreasonable that people still get heated about this topic. There are plenty of things worth discussing other than minor inconveniences like wearing masks or washing hands.
          • fvdessen 5y ago
            I personally don't think wearing masks are a minor inconvenience, and never got used to it. I like to see people's faces.
  • user-the-name 5y ago
    Sweden had mortality rates nearly 10x those of their neighbours.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • throw20211202 5y ago
      Not really, though: * Sweden: 1,485 * Denmark: 500 * Finland: 244 * Norway: 199 * Iceland (not really a neighbour, being a 1000 miles away, accross an ocean): 102 Some more random cherrypicking: * USA: 2,414 * Italy: 2,221 * Belgium: 2,322 * UK: 2,124 * Russia: 1,901 * Peru: 5,984 Deaths per million capita, as of 2nd december 2021, from[1]. [1] All numbers from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
      • user-the-name 5y ago
        Pretty sure 1485 is nearly 10x 199.
        • ajvs 5y ago
          You said "neighbours", when in reality you mean "one neighbouring country".
          • user-the-name 5y ago
            What useless nitpicking. How does that affect the actual argument in any way?
        • 1cvmask 5y ago
          Sweden has the highest density pockets of all of them. Meanwhile Norway has more fjords than people.
        • ch4s3 5y ago
          The VAST majority of deaths there are people over 70, and Sweden like the US warehouses old people in cramped retirement homes where the virus can spread rapidly regardless of the public health approach outside. Their deaths fell off precipitously once vaccines got to the old. The lesson here seems to be that nursing homes probably cause some amount of excess mortality, and need special attention during epidemics/pandemics.
  • GVIrish 5y ago
    Sweden did worse than the other Scandinavian countries that enacted stricter Covid restrictions, including lockdowns. Sweden had roughly 5-7x as many deaths per capita as its immediate neighbors of Norway and Finland. Germany had less deaths per capita as well: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
    • jseban 5y ago
      And what is expected deaths per capita? That relative measure is irrelevant unless you compare it to some kind of normal death rate in the past. Are you expecting deaths per capita to drastically drop and be kept much lower from 2020 and forward, compared to the past?
    • mythrwy 5y ago
      I'll be curious to know what these numbers are in 5 years.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • tomohawk 5y ago
      What is this obsession with limiting comparison of Sweden with "other scandanavian countries"? Is there some sort of special risk factor that only applies to scandanavia? Does COVID know what people look like? Why not compare stats of major metro areas with other similar metro areas in the world?
      • mijamo 5y ago
        Because the density of the metro areas are similar. Stockholm is not comparable to Paris or London when it comes to density for instance. Culture is also very similar between Scandinavian countries and much different from western Europe, with people much more isolated (which is tough to adjust to for immigrants there actually).
        • 5y ago
  • xg15 5y ago
    What exactly do those studies compare? How countries without lockdown coped in the same wave? Lockdowns were called because hospitals were at capacity and immediate risk of failing to keep up service - as is currently again the case e.g in Germany. Remember, the first lockdowns in Europe were mandated after hospitals in Italy were forced to conduct triage. (The "who do I have to let die" kind of triage) Why did that not happen in whatever control groups the studies were looking at?
  • standardUser 5y ago
    If Swedish hospitals exceeded capacity as has happened in other nations (like the US) then there would have been more severe restrictions. The name of the game is and always has been "don't let this very contagious virus collapse our healthcare systems". The "we should have never shut anything down" contingent doesn't seem to understand this.
  • oezi 5y ago
    No, we should have strived to get everyone vaccinated (by making it mandatory) and then this pandemic would be over in Europe. "Opening up" would have killed more people than it killed in the UK. The people driving this wave, who are getting seriously ill and dying are the unvaccinated.
    • ipaddr 5y ago
      How would you enforce this mandatory vaccine? Would you go as far as killing the unvaccinated?
      • oezi 5y ago
        Like you enforce anything: by passing a law which makes it mandatory, by introducing a fine and by assigning somebody to monitor it. It is not going to be a crime to be unvaccinated just a lot more inconvenient.
• hogFeast 5y ago
  It is worth remembering the "let people get on with it and they will work out" viewpoint within Europe was widely discredited by April 2020 (and ignoring the fact it worked in countries like Japan that have quite significant constraints on govt power). My conclusion from this is that, in this area, regulations are path dependent. In some countries, people will make the right choices themselves. In others, they won't. I am in the UK, in 2020 it was evident that the hands-off approach really wouldn't work. But it did work this year. Also, I don't think there is any question about fixing it. You have to test (most countries still don't test enough), you have to give people the information to make a choice, and you have to keep vaccinating. Imo, and I thought the opposite in 2020, lockdowns/heavy regulations aren't a long-term strategy (outside of China).
  • creato 5y ago
    I think in general, the gap between what regulations say and what people will do anyways will be small (as long as the regulations are more strict than "default" behavior). At the beginning of the pandemic, where I was, people mostly stopped going to restaurants before regulations said they couldn't. When restrictions have been relaxed, I couldn't really observe any changes in behavior.
  • ryan_lane 5y ago
    Japan didn't "let people get on with it and they will work out". The immigration policy is one of the strictest in the world. We've had numerous "lock downs", which weren't legally enforceable, but when the government makes a request of businesses and people, the compliance rate is very high, and though it's not enforceable, the government will publicly shame companies, and companies take their reputations extremely seriously. People's willingness to comply with lockdowns over time has waned, because the government's response to covid has been pretty incompetent. The thing that has finally started turning things around is the high rate of vaccination.
• Krasnol 5y ago
  There was a paper recently circulating the media which shows the immense amount of "esoteric" people in German speaking countries. Those people are responsible for the staggering vaccination numbers and spreading of conspiracy myths around this crisis. It's so prevalent, I can't remember anyone who at least once spread some unscientific bullshit in the last 2 years here. The handling of those people in the media and the way their opinions are presented equally with scientific facts result in this reluctance politicians displayed in this crisis. Now we all have to suffer because of it. I hope we finally mandatory vaccinations...it's overdue.
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    By esoteric you mean pseudoscience believers, homeopaths and the like? Recently moved back from Germany after five years there, homeopathy depressingly common and accepted there, even by many medical professionals.
    • Krasnol 5y ago
      Yes this is what I meant. We still have homeopathic pills and "treatments" which are being paid by the health insurance. Something which goes back to some politicians wife who believed in it and was able to influence the political process. The huge Steiner tradition in here is catastrophic. We just recently had COVID running wild in a Waldorf school. Turns out, faked vaccination certificates were very popular... It's quite embarrassing and it's actually the first time the side effects of this madness come up in public discourse.
  • native_samples 5y ago
    The problem with this claim is that vaccine fanatics spread vast amounts of misinformation themselves, and often rely on it for their core arguments. Just in this thread alone, we can find people saying: 1. Vaccines would let us wipe out COVID (wrong). 2. Even harsher lockdowns would let us wipe out COVID (wrong). 3. Vaccines stop people transmitting it (wrong). 4. Vaccinated people don't end up in ICU with COVID (wrong). 5. Sweden had unusually bad outcomes (wrong). 6. That it's "very normal" for people to take yearly flu shots (wrong, only ~35% uptake amongst at risk patients in 2019). And that's not even a full list. There's not only a large set of factually incorrect beliefs amongst vaccine mandate fanatics (and that's the only word for you guys now), but also a generalized incorrect belief that it's the other side who are badly informed.
• est31 5y ago
  Germany had elections at the end of September, and I feel that this is the main reason for the catastrophy that is unfolding now. It has prevented the ruling parties from imposing stricter vaccination requirements more early on. They could have easily required everyone to be vaccinated by November first, and this current situation would have been spared. Now the government still has to do it, but they need to rush it, and they impose unrealistic goals like 30 million vaccinations until christmas. After Macron's speech in July to put vaccination requirements for the medical industry, there was a major surge to the vaccination centers. Meanwhile Germany was in pre election mood. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-vaccination-doses-per-capita?country=FRA~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-vaccination-d... You can see the effect of Macon's speech clearly on this graph: it led to a major surge in per-day vaccinations in mid July 2021 while Germany stayed in steep decline, and the "corona is over" mentality spread. Germany has reduced its distance to France in the last few weeks, but France still has more vaccinations than us, and it's far away from european leaders like Portugal. At the start of covid, everyone in europe admired Germany for its good covid response. They flew ICU patients from Italy to Germany as the italian hospitals were way beyond their capacity. Now we might have to fly Germans the other way. Yes, you can say that there has barely been public support for vaccination requirements up until the start of the current wave. And indeed it's been quite unpopular in the autumn. But if politicians had been more courageously trying to sell vaccination requirements, maybe it'd have worked out.
  • novaRom 5y ago
    This current wave moves from the east to the west. In fact, Germany has probably peaked, we have 4 days in a row of declining number of infections. France is at the beginning of the next wave, their number of today's infections is approaching German numbers. source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
    • est31 5y ago
      Note that German infrastructure is at its limits in terms of how many tests can be done or whether the health office can track down the people a known covid case has been in contact with. Due to the sheer size of the wave, the percentage of unknown covid cases has increased. source (German): https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rki-zahlen-corona-125.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rki-zahlen-corona-125.html But yes, there is a strong west/east and north/south gradient in terms of incidence.
• elorant 5y ago
  No democratic country is built to handle something like a pandemic. That much became clear the last two years. You need to be able to mandate strict laws that take away a lot of liberties that we have learn to consider as standard.
  • novaRom 5y ago
    Many countries do currently mandate strict laws that take away a lot of liberties. Australia, Canada, Europe, parts of US. Are they still democracies?
    • LilBytes 5y ago
      Absolutely not, have you seen Fox News. Us over here in Australia are absolutely needing to be liberated by the US. I can't wait till the Marines roll in. Its terrifying, over here in Brisbane, Queensland. We've had one locally acquired case from Covid in the last few months. We're going to pubs, no masks, No Covid. But we're sorely missing our freedom. /s
      • vinay427 5y ago
        While I don’t believe this was true across Australia at certain points in the pandemic, your point is definitely taken and I would agree with the message. However, I don’t understand the US-centric (satirical) perspective in a comment like this. The article is about Germany, the person you replied to made no specific mention of the US as far as I can tell, and their view is not unusual in many other regions of the world (such as the one I live in). Does the radicalism of Fox News really need more attention or notoriety?
        • LilBytes 5y ago
          Fair comment. Fox News certainly does not need any more attention.
    • jseban 5y ago
      No they are not. If you can declare a state emergency in the name of public health without quantifying it in any way, and bypassing any forms of debates or elections or votes (one expert said something), that's for sure not a democracy.
• jll29 5y ago
  Ex-paramedic turned comp sci researcher here. > There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people really understood it as "corona is over" I totally agree. Last week saw a dentist and this morning (10:02) two sales ladies at a baker's embedded in an EDEKA supermarket with no mask, one of them coughing. When pointing out politely that they should really put their masks on, my comment of mine was ignored. The unfair thing is that it won't be these people dying, but likely third parties that did nothing wrong (like the elderly couple behind me in the queue). There is a huge debate focusing on vaccination, about forcing people to do it etc., but schools are open, kindergardens are open (every parent knows that's where stuff spreads), people shop, socialise, eat together, work together almost if there was nothing going on. The government failed to point out that vaccinated people can still get CoViD because they were afraid it would stop people from getting the jab, so they assumed they were safe and went back to pre-CoViD behavior patterns. The government is reducing the testing regime, so future numbers will be less reliable. Public TV station ARD/Das Erste started to lose credibility with me when they claimed on Twitter that medical masks don't protect. That is false/"fake news": the truth is they are designed to protect the patient when worn by staff, so their protection is asymmetric and biased against the wearer and in favor of the person talking to the wearer. But they do provide a little protection even for the wearer, as the larger droplets get caught by them, and catching a virus also depends on the amount and concentration of viral material exposed to. (The reason the posted the tweet was because at the time, there was a shortage and they did not want that non-medical staff buy them up so there was enough of a supply for medical staff. It's okay to ask people to stop buying them for that reason but not feeding them with false information to make them stop.) The new government put a general in place to run a task force and instead of saying "fantastic, why didn't the previous government think of that?" the press questioned why leaders who all declined military service on the grounds of conscience appointed a military man (the candidate seems to be a supply chain expert, so not a bad choice - although I personally would pick a paramedic because pandemic training is part of one's education, at least it was back in the 1990s when I did mine). Despite all of this, in fairness the situation in Germany is much better than in other countries (I can only say that from personal knowledge about the UK, France and the US), and I would say that at the beginning, the government did a good job in absolute and relative terms.
• oezi 5y ago
  Two major components for this winter wave: 1.) We just had our federal election so politicians were super cautious not to alienate anyone with though measures. Because we didn't have the transition of power to the new chancellor yet, this is still holding us back. 2.) If vaccination rates would just be another 5% higher (meaning 20% less unvaccinated people), the speed of the 4th wave would have been so much damper that we would have gotten through this winter without any hard restrictions (see France). I think there was a lot of wishful thinking involved that thought that those 5% would come around eventually.