Read on Twitter
10 months since #COVID_19 was first diagnosed in Germany. The country is slowly losing it's "best of the class" image. Wanna hear a grumpy thread about some of the major shortcomings.
- There still are no centrally or locally distributed contingent of masks. Not for the public, not for schools, not for retirement homes.
The local health authorities are still not staffed appropriatly, so that contact tracing works. As soon as they trace contacts across county borders, they miss competencies. Inter-authoritiy communication still relies on telefax. They still mostly do forward, not backward tracing
- There is still no form of digital cluster recognization whatsoever. Neither within the app, nor with separate, digital venue check-ins, that could help out. Even for paper lists, lawmakers failed to ensure trust in them by allowing police to use the records.
- Even if the tracing would work, there still are no isolation hotels or Central quarantine places. Resulting in known infectious people being sent back to their families to "home isolation".
We still do not know the tests done in each county. Not overall, not weekly and certainly not by age. Resulting in total blindness on positivity rates below state levels to better judge the severity of outbreaks.
Rapid tests are even worse, as no one knows how many tests are done at the moment, even on federal level. But, even retirement homes have to order them by themselves and usage is very low anyway. Starting November, 95% of the staff said, they never used one.
Parties rightly complain about executive overreach, but not a single parliament so far did come up with a thorough roadmap of how to react at what level of risks on how this is measured, bounding this overreach precautionary. And how, if we don't have local test numbers?
Schools are still so ill-prepared digitally, that most education secretaries view digital distance learning as no learning at all, but double the effort, resulting in a "no matter the costs" approach to leaving schools open. Thereby, not enforcing home-office on parents as well.
That's it for know. It is obvious the country reacted way to hesitant (both, state level and federal level, but especially state level) and still is, as overall numbers have been stable on high level for 3 weeks now, while incidence grows and grows among the oldest. Sucks.
For anyone interested, @karl_lauterbach, speaker for health issues for the co-governing party SPD, epidemiologist, and eternal admonisher during this pandemic reacted with several suggestions on how to change these problems (in German). https://twitter.com/Karl_Lauterbach/status/1334834728382435339?s=20
