Covid 19 CRISIS

But what if I wanted to know if bananas are good?
 
Listen to someone from my neck of the woods?
 
Listen to someone from my neck of the woods?
I can trade you pictures of Orange Juice walls in grocery stores for banana facts. :)
 
Listen to someone from my neck of the woods?

Or ask any American, since we are pulling some Banana Republic level bullshit here.
 
In positive news, the German lockdown (which still is not half as hard as I would like it to be, working from home is still only "recommended" not mandatory, for example) is working at least in so far as it seems like Germany made it through the holiday season without a dramatic rise in infections. So now we "only" have to get numbers to drop.
Also, eventhough it is overshadowed by a lot of hare-brained criticism, the vaccination campaign is off to a successful start.

In not so positive news, for some idiotic reason my hometown of Berlin, as the only place in Germany, decided to re-open the schools, which is not only stupid, but also in blatant disregard of the Federal States' agreement on lockdown measures.

How can a supposedly well-governed country like this fuck up so much in a quarter? We should have been in lockdown since mid-October latest. We should have not worn down people with a "lockdown light" for six weeks, only to start the real lockdown afterwards when lockdown fatigue is already setting in and compliance drops. But yeah, to "protect the economy" we had to do the lockdown after Christmas, when economic activity is low due to the holidays anyways.
You know who was on holidays as well? Public health authorities and labs. Estimate is we'll have cleared up the backlog in reporting and testing in time to have reliable numbers by the 17th or so, meaning we are more or less flying blind until then (which also party taints the "good news" above).

This is such a monumental cock-up I can't even begin to fathom it. I have been defending our government viciously over the last year, but since October, they have completely lost the plot. Mind you, we will still get out of the pandemic, but with tens of thousand of people dead due to political incompetence and cowardice.
 
So monumental? Your own people didn’t wander into a federal building with the police allowing them to.
 
So monumental? Your own people didn’t wander into a federal building with the police allowing them to.
We had three(!) police officers defending the Parliament when neo-nazi affiliated covid deniers tried to storm it a few months ago. The rest of Berlin's police force was busy using 1500 officers to evict militant leftist from a squat. Because protecting the rights of the property owner takes precedence even during a pandemic.
 
You know who was on holidays as well? Public health authorities and labs. Estimate is we'll have cleared up the backlog in reporting and testing in time to have reliable numbers by the 17th or so, meaning we are more or less flying blind until then (which also party taints the "good news" above).
We're not flying that blindly, we know it's bad. Just see test positivity rates skyrocket over the holidays, a clear indicator of an increased Dunkelziffer.
 
We're not flying that blindly, we know it's bad. Just see test positivity rates skyrocket over the holidays, a clear indicator of an increased Dunkelziffer.
With case numbers dropping at the same time, so whether it got a bit better or a bit worse or stayed about the same or whether there's a massive difference we don't know. Berlin seems to be at roughly the same level as before Christmas now that labs are finding their footing again.

At least the three officers were successful in keeping the mob out.
Point taken.
 
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With case numbers dropping at the same time, so whether it got a bit better or a bit worse or stayed about the same or whether there's a massive difference we don't know. Berlin seems to be at roughly the same level as before Christmas now that labs are finding their footing again.
Well, this sharp rise in positivity rate together with the drop in tests could only fit together with a not-fucked-up reality if the preselection of who to test suddenly improved massively during the holidays... which I doubt is realistic.

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Instead I see a steady rise in positivity rates week over week [yes, ignoring 44/45 due to the footnote].
 
Well, this sharp rise in positivity rate together with the drop in tests could only fit together with a not-fucked-up reality if the preselection of who to test suddenly improved massively during the holidays... which I doubt is realistic.
Not gonna fight you, since we both in the end don't know. For Berlin I see that after a sharp drop in cases (due to labs being closed and people not being in town during to the holidays) we are now about where we were before the holidays, which, again, has to be considered close to a best-case scenario compared to what happened in the US after Thanksgiving. Of course, if there is a spike from New Year's celebrations, we will only see it early next week, so no reason to celebrate prematurely.
In any case, the lockdown as a case reduction measure only began in earnest on Jan 1st, after the festive season, so any positive development we won't see before end of next week.
 
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Reuters reports that Pfizer has confirmed the UK mutation does not impact their vaccine. Next up: The South Africa one, data to be expected in the next weeks.
 
We're not flying that blindly, we know it's bad. Just see test positivity rates skyrocket over the holidays, a clear indicator of an increased Dunkelziffer.
One alternative explanation I have heard is that the official number only counts PCR tests, so if you get a rapid antigen test to check for covid before Christmas, a negative test does not show up in the statistics, but a positive antigen test will be confirmed by PCR, leading to a pre-filtered sample of people getting PCR tested in CW52 and reported in CW53.

What we know is that new infections reported today pretty much match what we saw in CW51, meaning things certainly did not magically get better over Christmas.
 
So much for operation warp speed -
 
Comparing German covid infections for the last few days (i.e. "now that public health departments are back at work") to those the week before Christmas gives me some more hope we managed to avoid a "holiday spike". Now we really have to get case numbers down quickly before the UK variant makes it even more complicated. In simple terms, it seems to elevate the "secondary attack rate", i.e. the percentage of contacts infected, from 10% to 15-ish%, so indeed a 50% increase. As almost all scientists have pointed out, this does NOT mean that lockdowns don't work anymore and that the situation in London or Ireland is to blame on the mutation and thus "nobody's fault", but it indeed means that if there is exponential growth, it will be steeper, and that it is harder to keep the growth from occuring. So once again, the case for tough as nails lockdowns and super low covid numbers (the Finland/'Straya approach) gets stronger.
 
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