I've sort of stopped living under a rock in some regards, all since this pandemic thingie really started to take off - I'm now actually following the news (or at least some of it). Which means I'm also looking at the numbers. Or should I say The Numbers?
And ah, they are not pretty, not in Germany, not anywhere else except maybe in China, where things seem to be all under control for now. It's weird, to me, how there's this rise in new infections everywhere and yet, if you look at German people and German news, a lot of voices can be heard that say "don't restrict this or that now, or our economy won't make it".
For instance, there's a ban on renting hotel rooms to people from "high risk areas", which is every city or district with a 7-day incidence of more than 50 new cases per 100 000 inhabitants. That 7-day number is the one most important for German rulings right now, and there was, theoretically, an agreement on things having to happen as soon as it's crossed in a place, but every step is debated there as well.
That ban on renting is, understandably, not looked upon kindly by the hotel owners. Especially since it's not the same in all of Germany (welcome to our federal state system), because the states could not agree on a common line.
And that is one of the main things lamented over these days - there's no common politic, no common guideline, no common rules for Germany. (Same is true for the EU, by the way, which is also not quite perfect, but that's another can of worms.) It would be easier in some regard if there was a firm rule of, say, "everyone has to wear a mask in public if numbers go above 35". I can see that it may be hard to find a set of rules that all the federal state heads can agree to, but at the moment, it seems to me that there's lots of talking only, and lots of "if this or that is restricted, that part of economy will die", and nothing really happens, and numbers are still rising. A part of this, I think, is due to utterings (found in the news) like "you can't compare the numbers now with those from April, because there's much more testing now". Oh really? Well, you can still see that the numbers are rising, and how quickly they do that, and it's not so hard to figure that while exponential growth with 50% of tests coming out positive and with 1.5% of tests coming out positive is still exponential growth, and since we all know that the earlier this growth is stopped the better, it would be much more sensible to act sooner rather than later. Sigh. The humans. (Me included. I'm also not happy about the prospect of restricting our still very limited social life even further...)
We still don't know so much about the virus, and how quickly it spreads in what kind of situation. All we can do for now is try to break the infection chains again. We've done it before, rather successfully... so I'm hoping we'll be able to do so again. Before winter really starts... and especially before everyone goes to see their family and extended family for Christmas.
Germans were asked not to go visit family for Easter; that's something that we also usually do, and we stayed home here this year. The same, though, is much harder to imagine happening for Christmas, and I'd be much more unwilling not to go see my family then. So. Stay careful, and safe, everybody. Let's get this wave dealt with, doing our bit... so we can all have a bit more normalcy back in a few weeks!