Is Italy really imitating Germany in anti-Covid measures?
Italy and Germany: a comparison on the anti Covid measures and the numbers of the pandemic. Stefano Magni's article for Atlantico Quotidiano
Germany is certainly a successful model in the fight against the pandemic , and it seems strange that so far it has never been imitated in its strategy: a lot of decentralization in management (each Land has its own rules), swabs and blanket tracking have allowed the Germans to live much more freely than Italians, with far fewer deaths. To give an idea of the difference: Italy records 1,090 deaths per 1 million inhabitants, Germany 278 (data updated to 15 December 2020). The loss of GDP is estimated in Italy at -9.1 percent, in Germany -5.5 percent. But why, only now, is Germany being mentioned as an example? Because Angela Merkel has announced a lockdown for the Christmas holidays, until 10 January.
This is the only reason. No one in the Conte government intends to leave the regions more autonomy and the Italians freer by increasing tampons and tracking, places in intensive care and hospital beds in general, but simply wants to send the message that, since the Italians have been "Bad" in the first weekend of partial opening of the main regions, now it must close, as they do in Germany.
There is a small reality problem: in Germany they close during the Christmas period because an increase in infections has been identified, but so far they have been relatively free. In Italy the situation is the opposite: the contagion is gradually decreasing, after two months of lockdown, more or less rigid depending on the region, hard in the red ones, quite hard in the orange ones, softer in the yellow ones. Again in numerical terms, in Italy the bi-weekly change in cases is -36 percent, in Germany it is +14 percent (source Our World in Data, updated to 14 December 2020)
What is the point of imitating a country where conditions are opposite to ours? Rationally none. But here, as we have seen in all these months of pandemic, there is very little rationality. Above all, emotionality counts and among the various emotions, the impact of images.
As always, journalists are fueling this fear. The titles are not very sober and do not contribute to the calm, such as "Full squares, clogged morgues", "Pictures of full squares are scary". Fear that can have many reasons, either because of the natural sociopathy of the intellectual who shuns the crowd, or because of the catto-communist morality of those who do not admit that some healthy person goes shopping while many people are dying of disease ("we should feel every day inside national mourning of us ”, as Minister Boccia says). So much so that the photos of the Neapolitan crowds paying homage to Maradona did not provoke as much indignation (it was a funeral, therefore moral).
In summary: we did what the government wanted, that is, we went shopping in stores, to support them. But in doing so we angered the government, because we showed that we didn't internalize national mourning enough. And now the government is punishing us, citing Merkel.
(Article published on Atlantico Quotidiano, here the original version)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/davvero-litalia-imita-la-germania-nelle-misure-anti-covid/ on Thu, 17 Dec 2020 10:55:16 +0000.