Covid, all the difficulties of Germany facing the fourth wave
The fourth wave of Covid, which ended up in Germany out of control due to a complex of responsibilities, risks damaging the economy once again, starting with the service sector. Pierluigi Mennitti's point
Now the appeal comes from the economic world: hurry up and do well. The fourth wave of Covid, which ended up in Germany out of control due to a complex of responsibilities, risks damaging the economy once again, starting with those most exposed sectors such as services.
"More tampons, more vaccinations, the ability to track infections, and above all more restrictive rules to avoid new lockdowns", asks Clemens Fuest, president of the Munich IFO, one of the most authoritative economic research institutes in the country.
But the lockdowns are beginning to creep into the folds of decisions taken by various regions, at least in those districts where infections have skyrocketed, up to over 1,000 per 100,000 inhabitants in seven days. Numbers never seen during the previous waves that are sending hospitals and intensive care units haywire, so much so that from the most affected places such as Bavaria, people are preparing for the transfers of the seriously ill also to Italy: Lombardy has signaled availability, in the name of solidarity for what happened, on the contrary, in the winter of 2020.
Fuest recalled the horrific figures of the economy in the months of the pandemic: in Germany the measures adopted in 2020 and 2021 to counter the three previous waves cost 325 billion euros in losses, numbers that the Ifo itself considers to be a defect. It was the biggest economic crisis since the depression of the 1930s, Fuest added, and school closures must be avoided at all costs, which will produce further high social and economic costs in the long term.
But precisely the schools, the last bastion of resistance at all costs, are beginning to falter in the face of the spread of the virus among unvaccinated children. Brandenburg was the first to cancel the promise not to return to distance learning, re-inserting the hypothesis among the measures that can be adopted in the coming days. In the complex German bureaucratic mechanism, it means that it could happen soon.
The measures that Fuest and other economists ask to introduce urgently (forms of green pass, here called 2G and 3G according to the restrictions) have already been judged insufficient by Angela Merkel, who nevertheless continues only to launch appeals and make statements, without affecting the decisions to be made. It is true that the government is still in charge of ordinary administration, but to unload on the future one (which will probably arrive at the beginning of December) the responsibilities that still belong to the current one is a purely tactical game. And that costs human lives: 309 people died from Covid on Monday 22 November.
From Wednesday, the green pass for public transport will be mandatory, starting with the trains on which anyone could get on until now. It took weeks to arrive at this decision, with politicians and officials who feared operational and bureaucratic difficulties: what works quite simply in Italy seems a very complicated thing in Germany.
Now, following the Austrian example, many politicians put forward the hypothesis of introducing the obligation to vaccinate, in the face of the lowest immunization rates in the major European countries. But the campaign for the third dose is already proceeding smoothly: many vaccination centers had been closed, reopening them and bringing them back to full functionality takes time, also because most of the staff had relocated elsewhere. Those in operation have booking lists already full until the end of the year.
Many clinics remain meticulously tied to the sixth month deadline and do not accept early bookings. In the meantime, the Minister of Health Jens Spahn also set about creating further turmoil, asking operators to slow down the request for Pfizer-Biontech doses to dispose of the Moderna ones. Both are effective vaccines, but Germans prefer Pfizer developed by German Biontech and forcing citizens to choose Moderna can slow down the booster operation.
The constant communication incidents testify that even the minister can't wait to pass his hand. It was misleading to announce not to extend the emergency law, not so much because the regions could not adopt adequate measures, but because at the full start of the fourth wave it sent the signal to break ranks. Neither the aforementioned controversy over vaccines, nor the sentence pronounced at the press conference (“At the end of winter, the Germans will all be vaccinated, cured or dead”) helped. Spahn seems to have lost the balance necessary to manage such a difficult phase. However, the minister said he was against the introduction of the vaccination obligation, but we can be sure that the debate will continue.
Among the measures under discussion, a further restriction on private contacts, especially for the unvaccinated, closures for bars and clubs (infection hotspots according to a recent study), restrictions on admission to Christmas markets, which from next weekend will officially take the start coinciding with the first advent. But as always, each Land goes on its own: in Bavaria some Christmas markets have already been canceled, starting with the historic one in Munich.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/covid-tutte-le-difficolta-della-germania-alle-prese-con-la-quarta-ondata/ on Wed, 24 Nov 2021 07:26:13 +0000.