OK, as announced in another thread, I will have less time to post here more because I am working again in the touristic sector in a hotel at night and the "Tragikomödie" (="tragical comedy") of my whole life continues: I was born in a family with three women around me (a loving mother and my two older "evil" half-sisters, who are responsible for some of my obsessions, I think) and now, I am living in Germany with a female chancellor and inside in a German federal state with a female prime minister in a city with a female mayor. My boss in the hotel is now a relatively young and very friendly female manager, my colleagues are young and very, very friendly female desk agents at the reception and taken this history altogether is sometimes "a bit hard" for me, because I am only a poor good-looking man and so, I always was the "sexually harassed minority".
OK, you don't have to feel pity for me, I am doing this by my own.
Additionally, one guest from Belgium already told me yesterday evening at the reception:
"This typical German efficiency is frightening again for all your neighbouring countries. We thought, it would be not so frightening with your chancellor Angela Merkel, but during the coronavirus-crisis, it is becoming even worse! How do you only do that?"
I told him, even I am shocked how fast and perfect my female colleages are working and I am always frightened, too, by "my Germany". It is a typical German behaviour to be frightened by everything and so you have always to be ready to fight against everything, because we Germans were much longer living in giant dark forests with more "saber tooth tigers", bears and wolves during the last 10.000 years than all our neighbours!
But I could also tell him of an article from the German "Tagesschau", that even the Germans are not so sure and cannot really explain, why they are so successful during the last 6 months. In some way, one possible explanation is similar to my last 4 or 5 postings here.
Germany's history is very different from France's or Great Britain's history which were relatively soon centralized countries with one secured capital (Paris, London) and main city. In Germany, there were often different centers and different capitals in different states. Usually, this is not an advantage, but in a catastrophe, a war or a pandemic, it is an advantage, when you can easily shift the center of administration or the political center to another capital.
Moreover, right now, when there is an virus-outbreak in one German region, you can easily declare this administrative region to be a "no-go-area" with special restrictions and every citizen there is suddenly a bit of a "Pariah" for a certain time, according to special German law.
For example, the administrative region of "Gütersloh" with the outbreak in the slaughterhouses there is still a special region, separated in principle from the rest of the country (Gütersloh is red in this map):
Every hotel in Germany is ordered by every German administration to accept guests from Gütersloh only when they can show a doctor's confirmation that they are not infected by Covid-19 and this confirmation must have been made during the last 48 hours. Otherwise, no hotel will accept a guest from Gütersloh. It is hard for Gütersloh, but good for every other guests.
And the article I mentioned just before in my small-talk with my Belgian guest, is this one (translation just below the link):
Corona-Krise
www.tagesschau.de
Dealing with the Corona Virus - Why Germany copes better with the crisis
Status: 10.07.2020 4:00 p.m.
(By Gábor Paál and Dirk Asendorpf, SWR)
So far, Germany has mastered the corona crisis better than many other countries. The federal system of all places could be a factor - but that is not all.
Which countries are best prepared for a pandemic? An international research committee led by Johns Hopkins University has been regularly ranking the issue for years - the Global Health Security Index (GHS).
The United States was at the top, ahead of Great Britain - those countries that now have a particularly large number of victims in the corona crisis. France was also one of the countries that were considered "best prepared".
Germany, on the other hand, was included in the midfield - but has so far managed the crisis quite well, contrary to this expectation. How could the GHS panel's assessments be so wrong?
Unpredictable factors:
Of course there are factors that cannot be predicted. Italy, for example, had the bad luck that the virus arrived there very early and then spread quickly. Other European countries such as Germany were thus warned. When the first German cases were reported, the willingness to take sharp measures was all the higher.
But that cannot explain everything. Despite the development in Italy, Great Britain and the United States reacted completely differently than Germany.
This is the second factor that cannot be taken into account in a long-term ranking: How determined will the current government act in the specific case? Both Donald Trump in the United States and Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom initially trivialized the danger and allowed valuable time to pass.
Wrong parameters?
The GHS index apparently relied on the wrong parameters in its ranking. The medical factors - such as how well doctors are trained and hospitals are equipped - have been weighted very heavily. The index has certified the best conditions for the USA in terms of early warning and laboratory capacities. The laboratories were also there - but not really prepared for the new type of corona virus. In the beginning, only a negligible number of people were tested.
The underrated factor "welfare state"
Above all, however, the political and social structures of a country were completely underestimated. This includes the welfare state: Germany, for example, knows something like short-time work and there are rules for it. That helped a lot in the crisis to quickly implement effective measures such as the ban on contact, says Bielefeld sociologist Michael Huber in the podcast of SWR2 Wissen.
"You cannot effectively implement quarantine measures for an entire society unless you also provide welfare state support measures."
Huber is currently investigating how different countries are dealing with the crisis. In Great Britain, for example, short-time work is not even established as an instrument. And in the United States, many people have not only no unemployment insurance, but no health insurance either.
"Out of nowhere, so to speak, there is the need to go out and work anyway. This also explains why the lockdown measures in the US are far less successful than in Germany, for example."
Corona laws for business
In the Corona crisis, a number of laws were passed in Germany to protect the population socially and to support the economy. However, hardly any new laws were necessary for the actual lockdown, because the measures were all already provided for in the Infection Protection Act. In Germany, what often is called "small-scale work" paid off, according to constitutional lawyer Oliver Lepsius.
"The lower administrative authority is responsible for the enforcement of laws - that sounds very dry legal now. They can actually do it very well - locally, with hard quarantine measures. And in many other countries there is something nice like the 'lower administrative authority ' not at all."
German federalism also made it possible for the countries to loosen the strict measures at different speeds at the end of the first wave, adds Huber.
"In Germany it is relatively easy to switch from short-time work back to normal working hours. You can also organize this regionally and sectorally. In England you cannot say: southern England works, northern England has to remain in quarantine for two weeks. To a certain extent, they lack the tools to deal with such a problem."
Federal states, districts and city administrations
The principle also applies in centralized France that people in the different regions must not be treated differently. "And the Corona crisis is now trying for the first time to introduce regional differences. This is something completely new, so to speak."
16 federal states, 400 local district and city administrations - that's not what most people imagine a strong state to be. "When I talk about administration, many say: Oh God it is so boring!" Says state lawyer Oliver Lepsius. "You usually don't see the system performance in such questions!"