Not nice, but good to know.

There's weird things happening in Germany these days - demonstrations against the measurements taken to curb the spread of the Corona virus, because some people feel that having to wear a mask, or not being allowed to do everything like in normal times is taking away their personal freedom. Just like the ban on public religious services is seen, by some, to take away their freedom of religion. (I always thought that freedom of religion means you can believe whatever you want, and do religious things accordingly as long as that hurts nobody else, without being prosecuted or discriminated because of it. And that is still very much the case in Germany. Nobody prevented anyone from praying - just praying in groups was not allowed for a while.)

The problematic thing about these demonstrations is that a) obviously, those demonstrating are often not taking the virus seriously, and don't keep their distance from each other, and b) the people there come from a variety of different backgrounds and with different agendas, and a lot of those are not necessarily things that are, um, equipped with a positive attitude to our current democratic society. Or, to put it bluntly: A lot of right-wing extremist idiots happen to be among those demonstrating groups, trying to make the best out of the pandemic situation (as in make Germany Nazi again). Gah. At the same time, conspiracy theories are getting a lot of attention, and a lot of people fall for them. I find that scary.

One of the commonly repeated things in these theories is that Corona/COVID-19 is no worse than influenza is. Well. First of all, influenza is no joke, and it kills a lot of people each year (which could probably be avoided or lessened if we all behaved a bit differently during flu season... and who knows, maybe we will, in the future, knowing how to act in the fight against a virus now?). The argumentation is that obviously, a lot of the things predicted (like the German healthcare system collapsing) have not happened, and thus the virus can't be as dangerous or as deadly as it has been said, and in some cases it's even postulated that it doesn't actually exist at all. (Yes, the system has not collapsed yet - due to the measurements taken.) Fortunately, this is rather quickly cleared up, as there's such a thing as excess mortality - the difference between the number of people dying in a certain period compared to the average over the rest of the year, or the same period in previous years. The website EuroMOMO (short for European Mortality Monitor) has a lot of very impressive graphs showing the higher rates of death due to the current spread of COVID-19, and how different they are in countries that had their healthcare system brought to the edge of collapse or beyond, and in countries where the spread has been curbed strongly enough to prevent that. They are chilling graphs - but it's good to have them, and good to know.