The editors of the Wall Street Journal take note of Germany’s experiment in reopening the economy while simultaneously avoiding an increase in the introduction of new cases of COVID-19:
German officials are concerned that the disease’s reproduction rate, or R0, has drifted upward since smaller shops were allowed to reopen April 20. The Robert Koch Institute, the government’s disease-control agency, estimated Monday that the rate is 1. That means each infected person on average spreads the virus to one other person. A rate above one signifies exponential growth in infections.
That matters because Berlin is conducting an experiment in whether it’s possible to reopen an economy in a way that controls R0. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, became an internet sensation this month for a press conference in which she soberly lectured Germans on why they must suppress the rate, and why R0 would be the benchmark for the government’s reopening policies. Two days before the lockdown started easing, RKI estimated the rate was 0.8.
That approach and Germany’s aggressive test-and-trace program earlier in the outbreak were presented as a triumph of science-based policy in contrast to a certain U.S. President. Yet it’s plagued by problems. One, as the RKI acknowledges in its daily briefings, is that no one can know in real time what the reproduction rate is. RKI’s figure is only an estimate. Any leader who picks R0 as a policy target will be flying half-blind.
I don’t think the editors appreciate just how fundamentally COVID-19 is challenging the foundations of German social thinking. Germany is striving to remain German, a futile struggle in my opinion. The ethnic German population is more at risk from the virus because it’s older. A high toll among older ethnic Germans will leave a much higher proportion of ethnic Turks and Arabs who are not only not ethnically German, they’re not culturally German, either.
Additionally, Germany is highly dependent on process and near 100% conformance with the processes in place for its prosperity and its entire way of life. The VW scandal has already revealed the holes in that. How could the scandal take place at all? Why didn’t the processes in place prevent it from happening? It’s being portrayed as just a few bad apples but, given the nature of German society, IMO it’s more likely that the processes in place are actually an elaborate fraud.
Now they’re relying on process and conformance with the process in a society much less socially cohesive and, yes, less German that it has been at any time in the postwar period and, consequently, less conformant. Will they succeed? Or will they just have excellent metrics for why they failed?
Europe is a mess, and we are not far behind. The refusal to have children is the definition of a failed race. The future belongs to those who show up (Mark Steyn), and that is the Muslims and Africans who are invading Europe. Here in the US, the future belongs to Hispanics.
Have you noticed the disconnect between reality and Hollywood on TV and movies? On TV, LA is majority White with a large minority of Blacks. In reality, LA is majority Hispanic, with a White minority and very few Blacks. Similarly, San Fran is depicted as majority White with a substantial minority of Blacks. But San Fran is majority Asian, with some Whites and hardly any blacks. Up and down the West Coast, blacks are only a few percent of the population. Look it up.
What does this about American’s understanding of reality?
You’re talking shows? What about commercials? They appear to have an agenda. If you do a search for diversity in tv ads, you find people of all races feel
They are being manipulated to accept absolute diversity that doesn’t actually exist. Anymore than big city police departments that only employ attractive models in their 30’s.
Wonder what propaganda Germans have to endure in media.
Or maybe they are used to propaganda,
Nazis were good at it.
Haha, good one!
Reminds me that at my last job, oh so long ago, one of the other departments came up with the brilliant plan of hiring more PT workers to replace FT workers, thus saving the company a many kilo-shit-tons of money in benefits expense. It was pointed out that it couldn’t work, because the UE rate was so low at that time that companies were having to pay out more to get workers to come work for them. We were assured that “No, people will take less pay and benefits to work for us, because we’re Disney!”
That didn’t happen.
Rather than admit defeat, the people that had cooked up with the plan spent a LOT of time, money and effort (not all of it from their own departments, which is how I came to get involved in the analysis) to show that even though Disney ended up not just with a higher number of FT workers, but a higher % of FT workers too, that the plan had succeeded anyway. “Our analysis proves that without our efforts things would have been even worse!’
It was all bullshit, and transparent bullshit, but the higher ups needed it to cover their asses, and the highest ups needed it to cover their asses in turn with important shareholders. (The Board at that time would do whatever the fuck Eisner and then Iger told them to do.)
It really wasn’t a surprise. The people in power had little to fear from failure, because they knew they could cram down whatever they wanted on the people that should have allegedly held them accountable. I presume Germany is still more a of a big fucking deal than Disney, so the German elites will continue to get away with whatever bullshit they want. That’s just the way of the world.
Speaking of metrics, link shows one of the ways states are keeping their death rates down. In Florida, the use the state of your official address to record your death. So if you are a snowbird or a visitor then they probably dont count your death as a Florida death.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/04/29/florida-medical-examiners-were-releasing-coronavirus-death-data-the-state-made-them-stop/
Steve
Where will the persecuted of the old world flee if Germany allows Europe to fall to Islam? Can’t they see they have a responsibility to preserve the liberal democracy that makes a magnet for an endless surge of desperate people?