Via The Washington Post: Germany's pandemic response was once hailed as a model. Now it's struggling. Excerpt:
BERLIN — Susanne Herold, pulmonary infectious-disease specialist at the University Hospital in the central German town of Giessen, is not looking forward to Christmas.
While the hospital’s intensive care ward has 50 of its 150 beds available, it only has the staff to service around 100 — meaning the unit is now effectively full.
“We are struggling,” she said. Four out of 12 doctors on her team are currently home after contracting the coronavirus.
While many countries across Europe introduced lockdowns in early November to bring down soaring case numbers and ease the burden on hospitals, Germany opted for what it called a “lockdown light” — closing bars and restaurants for eat-in meals but keeping hair salons and most businesses and retail open. Restrictions will be loosened in much of the country over the Christmas holiday week.
Already, contrasts around Europe are striking.
In France, where a lockdown required people to fill out a form to leave the house and nonessential businesses closed, cases have plummeted from more than 50,000 a day in early November to around 10,000 a day. Belgium, which had the highest per capita infection rate in Europe before its lockdown, has seen cases fall from more than 17,000 a day to around 2,500.
And although Germany stopped its exponential growth in its tracks, its number of daily cases has barely budged, hovering at around 20,000 per day.
It marks an about-face for Germany, which had been praised for its measured response in the first wave of the pandemic. That initial success may be hurting it now, some experts say, with people less inclined to take restrictions seriously.
Meanwhile, a decentralized federal state system makes agreeing to nationwide measures complicated, while its history with dictatorship makes for discomfort with anything seen as too authoritarian.
'Very tense'
“Even when Germany was seen as so successful, and taken as an example for many, we always knew we were always looking at one window of time,” Lothar Wieler, the head of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, the federal agency responsible for infectious-disease control, said this week.
“Right now, we just can’t get the numbers down. The situation remains very tense.”
