Let's see where things stand in Germany thanks to the unvaccinated. Germany warned Covid death toll could double as millions remain unvaccinated More than 97,000 people in Germany have so far died from Covid https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...id-deaths-unvaccinated-pandemic-b1955977.html With a third of its population unvaccinated and millions stubbornly unwilling to get inoculated, a vulnerable Germany has been hit hard by a record-breaking rise in Covid infections – an ominous surge that has filled hospitals amid a dire forecast that the death rate could soon double. The Robert Koch Institute said on Thursday that a record 50,196 people had been infected in the previous 24 hours, amounting to 249 new infections per 100,000 people. It was the fourth straight daily record and up sharply from 39,676 new infections set a day earlier. It was also nearly double the 33,949 infections recorded a week ago. A total of 97,198 people have died in Germany from Covid, including 235 on Wednesday. “We’re worse off than we were a year ago… and we’re now facing a real emergency situation,” said Germany’s leading virologist Christian Drosten in his daily podcast. He predicted Germany could end up with at least another 100,000 Covid-related deaths if the country doesn’t tighten protective measures and improve its low vaccination rates. “We’ve got 15 million people who actually could have been and should have been vaccinated by now,” said Drosten, referring to the 30 per cent of German adults who have declined government invitations for free shots. “The way out of this pandemic is so obvious. We’ve got to close the vaccination gap.” Vaccine hesitancy has long been a problem in Germany – along with neighbouring German-speaking populations in Austria and Switzerland, where between 30 and 34 per cent of the populations remain unjabbed. Unsurprisingly, case numbers are rising sharply in all three countries right now. The German government hoped that 85 per cent of its population would be vaccinated by now but is far below that target, stalled at 67 per cent. Germany was hailed for initial success in containing the pandemic and shielding its public from higher death rates seen elsewhere. But when it comes to vaccination rates, Germany lags far behind the UK, France and Spain, where about 80 per cent of the population have been vaccinated. In Germany the anti-vaxx movement has been especially vocal, fuelled by conspiracy theorists, “Querdenker” (mavericks) demonstrations, and the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD) party – although their co-leader Alice Weidel announced on Thursday she has been infected and will stay in quarantine. Famous figures such as pop star Nina and Bayern Munich footballer Joshua Kimmich have expressed doubts in public about the safety and efficacy of vaccinations. Scepticism about drugs have lingered for decades in Germany, where memories of the birth defects from the “Contergan” or Thalidomide scandal in the late 1950s remain strong. A growing chorus of political leaders and ethics experts are calling for mandatory vaccinations for medical and nursing home staff members. “We’ve got to get the country in shape for the coming winter,” said Olaf Scholz, the country’s designated chancellor, in a speech in parliament on Thursday. “The virus is still among us and is a threat to the health of all our citizens.” While interior minister Horst Seehofer, a 72-year-old with a history of heart problems, announced he was cancelling all in-person meetings and events, the state premier of hard-hit Saxony in eastern Germany, Michael Kretschmer, said Germany should cancel all its popular Christmas markets because hospitals were reaching their capacity limits. “You just can’t imagine how anyone could be standing outside having a good time at a Christmas market this year and sipping mulled wine while medical staff in hospitals are going all out with their last reserves to keep people alive,” said Kretschmer. Even though most German lawmakers are focused on putting together a new coalition government by the end of November after September’s elections, the newly formed centre-left coalition proposed a draft law on Thursday to reintroduce free Covid testing and mandatory daily testing for staff and visitors at nursing homes. The one consolation in Germany is that the number of deaths has fallen – experts say it’s thanks to vaccinations – from the peak of about 1,000 per day in late January to between 200 and 250 per day currently. While most Germans are opposed to new lockdowns that throttled Europe’s largest economy at times in the last 18 months, some state leaders are on the verge of once again introducing tougher restrictions – especially against unvaccinated people. “We are in the middle of a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said health minister Jens Spahn recently.
Germany’s Fourth Covid Wave: ‘A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated’ Germany once set an example for how to manage the coronavirus. Now, deep pockets of vaccine resistance are helping drive daily infections to new heights. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/world/europe/germany-covid-unvaccinated.html BERLIN — The University Hospital of Giessen, one of Germany’s foremost clinics for pulmonary disease, is at capacity. The number of Covid-19 patients has tripled in recent weeks. Nearly half of them are on ventilators. And every single one is unvaccinated. “I ask every patient: Why didn’t you get vaccinated?” said Dr. Susanne Herold, head of infectious diseases, after her daily round on the ward on Thursday. “It’s a mix of people who distrust the vaccine, distrust the state and are often difficult to reach by public information campaigns.” Patients like hers are the main drivers of a fourth wave of Covid-19 cases in Germany that has produced tens of thousands of new daily infections — more than the country has had at any point in the pandemic. For Germany it is a startling turnabout. At the onset of the pandemic, Germany had set an example for how to manage the virus and keep the death toll low. It was quick to put in place widespread testing and treatment, expand the number of intensive care beds and had a trusted leader in Chancellor Angela Merkel, a trained scientist, whose government’s social distancing guidelines were widely observed. But today, a combination of factors has propelled a new surge, among them wintry temperatures, a slow rollout of booster vaccines, and an even more pronounced spike in infections in neighboring eastern European nations like the Czech Republic. The fact that Germany is in a kind of political limbo as it transitions between governments has not helped. But virologists and pandemic experts say there is little doubt that it is the unvaccinated who are contributing most to the wave of infections burdening in hospitals across the country. “It’s our low rate of vaccination — we haven’t done what was necessary,” said Dr. Herold in Giessen. She was part of a team of scientists who modeled the impact of a fourth wave and warned in early summer that with the hyper contagious Delta variant at least 85 percent of the whole population would need to be vaccinated to avert a crisis in the health care system. “We are still below 70 percent,” she said. “I don’t know how we can win this race against time with the fourth wave. I fear we’ve already lost.” Germany’s vaccination rate is far better than that of many central and eastern European countries, where the death toll from coronavirus is soaring. In Romania, for example, only about four in 10 people have had two shots, and coronavirus deaths have hit record levels. Still, with about one in three Germans not yet fully vaccinated, the German vaccination rate is among the lowest in Western Europe. In Belgium, Denmark and Italy three in four people are fully vaccinated. In Spain and Iceland, only about two in 10 have yet to get the second shot. Portugal has a vaccination rate of close to 90 percent. The German rate lags because of pockets of vaccine resistance that are not limited to, but especially deep, in the former Communist east, where the far-right Alternative for Germany party is strong.Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel, leaders of the AfD’s parliamentary group, are both proudly unvaccinated — and both tested positive for the virus in recent weeks. “What we are experiencing is above all a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the minister of health, Jens Spahn, said earlier this month. Infections have also spiked in parts of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, two wealthy southern states that are home to a noisy protest movement againstmeasures to combat the virus, known as the “Querdenker,”or “contrarians.” “We have two viruses in the country,” Markus Söder, the Bavarian governor, said in a television debate recently. “We have coronavirus and we have this poison, which is being spread on a massive scale,” he said referring to misinformation about vaccines. Klaus-Peter Hanke knows about that poisonous propaganda firsthand. He is the mayor of Pirna, a town of less than 40,000 in the eastern state of Saxony, which experienced a wave of violent protests from anti-vaxxers in the final days of the lockdown last spring. One in three voters in the voting district that includes Pirna cast their ballots for the AfD in September’s national election. And just under half of inhabitants refuse to get vaccinated. They have helped to make Saxony the state with the lowest vaccination rate in Germany — and with the highest per capita number of new infections. “The readiness to get vaccinated is low here,” Mr. Hanke said in an interview. “We tried to counter that with dialogue. But there is a point where you hit a wall, and you just can’t get any further and one result is that it has escalated.” The Covid ward at the hospital is running out of beds. There, too, almost all patients are unvaccinated, Mr. Hanke said: “Nine out 10.” And still, several restaurants in town have signs in the window, inviting “everyone” — not just those vaccinated or recovered from an infection as per state rules — to come inside. There are now 10 control teams of three people each — a police officer a health official and someone from the department of public order — who roam the city’s restaurants, bars and hairdressers and fine those disregarding the rules on the spot: Owners have to pay 500 euros, about $572, patrons 150 euros, $170. “It’s pretty drastic,” said Mr. Hanke, who has vaccine resisters in his own circle of friends. “But we see no other way to get people to change their behavior.” Anecdotally at least, the tough approach might be paying off. Waiting times at mobile vaccination units increased to two hours this week, Mr. Hanke reported, suggesting that the threat of exclusion from much of indoor public life might be nudging more people to get a shot. Several other German states are now working on similar regulations, introducing stricter mask mandates and instead of a negative test, making proof of vaccination or past infection mandatory for entry to many venues. That may no longer be enough, said Sandra Ciesek, director of the Institute of Medical Virology at the University Hospital of Frankfurt and cosignatory of a paper by seven prominent scientists published last week, in which they urge politicians to speed up booster shots and consider a range of measures, including partial lockdowns for the unvaccinated or even a short-term national lockdown. The absence of political leadership at the national level at a time when the number of new daily infections is soaring beyond 50,000 has added to the muddled approach to containing the virus. Since her conservative party lost the national election in September, Ms. Merkel remains only as the head of a caretaker government while her likely successor, Olaf Scholz, has been absorbed by difficult coalition talks with two other parties. “Where is Angela Merkel?” Der Spiegel asked in an article this week, before asking a few paragraphs lower: “Where is Scholz?” It is a question many virologists across the country are asking, too, concerned that a lack of political leadership is wasting valuable time — and potentially costing lives. “There is no real center of power and responsibility: The country is missing leadership,” said Michael Meyer-Hermann, head of the department of Systems Immunology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research and a member of the council of experts that has advised Ms. Merkel throughout the pandemic. “The outgoing government no longer really reacts, and the incoming government is playing everything down,” he added. After the number of daily new coronavirus infections hit a record high on Nov. 3, reaching 33,949, German virologists sounded the alarm. The response from Mr. Scholz’s future coalition partners was a statement promising that there would not be another lockdown. “For me it was a key moment,” Professor Meyer-Hermann said. “They act like the pandemic is over at a time when the numbers are exploding.”
And in Germany the problems can be squarely pinned on the anti-vaxxers... According to the Robert Koch Institute, the incidence of hospitalizations for unvaccinated COVID-19 patients between 18 and 59 is currently about four times higher than for vaccinated ones. For patients over 60, it’s about six times higher.
Since it’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated, sooner or later all the unvaccinated will be dead, right? Then we’ll blame whom?
Lengthy article... A Federation of Imbeciles Anti-Vaxxers and Politicians Push Germany to the Brink Many in Germany thought the worst of the pandemic was behind them. But the country is now being slammed by the fourth wave – fueled by millions of people who refuse to be vaccinated and political leaders who have abdicated leadership. The situation, say virologists, is grave. https://www.spiegel.de/internationa...729575-a-1495255a-25af-4b8e-9727-4ea7f26db55f "A Pandemic of the Feebleminded"
Anti-Vaxxers Are Plunging Germany Into a COVID Death Spiral Germany’s anti-vaxxers are standing their ground, even as their country teeters on the brink of disaster. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-f...plunging-germany-into-a-covid-19-death-spiral German coronavirus infections hit new high, tighter measures planned https://www.reuters.com/world/europ...new-high-tighter-measures-planned-2021-11-15/
Europe is learning a crucial lesson -- vaccines work, but they alone won't stop Covid now https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/19/europe/europe-covid-vaccination-rates-fourth-wave-cmd-intl/index.html
Germany once again finds itself short of vaccines because they need more for boosters and the people will only accept using Pfizer / BioNTech (which was created in Germany). This is coupled that there are many doses of Moderna available in Germany currently which are nearing the expiration date and will need to be destroyed. Germany’s new health minister delivers a bombshell: The country doesn’t have enough COVID-19 vaccines https://fortune.com/2021/12/15/germany-new-government-shortage-covid-19-vaccine-doses-omicron/
Germany misses 80% vaccination target by end of January The German government is set to miss a target of giving at least one shot of coronavirus vaccine to 80% of the population by the end of January https://www.independent.co.uk/news/germany-berlin-olaf-scholz-b2004130.html