If it wasn’t for the fact we moved house in the summer, I would assume that it was still 2020. Every morning I turn on the radio to hear the morning update on soaring covid numbers, talking heads witter about possible solutions and the occasional politician calls to tell audiences what they would do, not do, or what the other lot should be doing. I eat breakfast among casual familial chaos, over my wife’s shoulder I see a map of Germany coloured in alarming shades of red and every morning it looks worse. Bavaria’s Minister President has described the current predicament as a “an endless corona loop”, somehow that feels both accurate and a gross understatement.

Only last month the great and the good of the German media were stroking their chins and pondering the case of Joshua Kimmich, German international footballer and Bayern Munich player. When he admitted in an interview in October that he wasn’t vaccinated (one among an apparent 34% of footballers in the Bundesliga), the reaction was to debate the ethics, to talk about individual rights and what responsibility public figures have to make a good example for their fans. Oh for the halcyon days of four weeks ago, where the topic of healthy people willingly refusing the vaccine filled a hole in the endless news cycle, rather than causing immediate outrage. Maybe I missed the talk show where someone pointed out the utter stupidity of the debate and the electrifying idiocy emanating from the mouth of one of the most high profile footballers in the country. I see that there are now increasingly vociferous calls for him to get vaccinated, but like Germany’s new covid guidelines, it seems far too late for that.

And what about the German government or rather is it governments? Angela Merkel is still haunting the palace like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, appearing here and there almost translucent in her presence. The traffic light coalition have managed to pass new covid regulations, despite not actually being in government, but not before the parade of political chancers popped up to drop their hottest of hot takes about why the new regulations were fascism, badly planned or not as good as the plan we had before. Watching proceedings on Thursday, there were plenty of examples that a low level of intelligence is never a bar to public office, and given the nature of humans, possibly an advantage. 

No matter, we have some new rules to follow, it doesn’t matter that they will arrive at a snail’s pace and so late that had they been attending a meeting, Jürgen from accounting would have ritually chewed them out for disrespecting one of the oldest of German stereotypes. The map of Germany is only going to become more red going by the reports from the Robert Koch Institute. The head of the RKI made waves himself this week when he simply expressed plainly how badly we are getting it wrong in Germany. Lothar Wieler’s line about a “Bad Christmas” sent shockwaves through the country, after all, we’ve all been waiting for the markets to return. I’ve said before that the return of the festive markets was my personal gauge of how well Germany was handling the pandemic. Today we found out: there won’t be any Christmas markets.

Although a lot of attention has focused on the reddest of German states in the East of the country, it does seem that we missed the ever increasing rate of infections and hospitalisations in Germany’s southern states, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. Now though, the Bavarian government of Markus Söder has remembered what they were elected to do, namely run the state. It had begun to feel like Söder’s attention had turned to waspish commentaries on the state of conservative politics as his entire world revolved around the German election in the Summer. We had Chancellor candidate Söder, then spurned lover Söder when he failed in his bid to become the CDU’s chancellor candidate, and then we had statesman Söder, propping up the political corpse of Admin Laschet and politely swatting away the flies that kept gathering.   

What we didn’t have, despite claims to the contrary, was Minister President Markus Söder. How else do we explain the failure to heed the warnings coming out of Der bayerische Ethikrat (Bavarian Ethics Council). They warned about complications going into another pandemic winter on June 10th. They were calling for better planning in the summer, but they were ignored. Germany’s most expensive fly swatter was far too busy to worry about the issues of the pandemic, after all it was summer, the bars were open and there were media appearances to be made and photo ops to attend. 

They say the fish rots from the head and there is certainly some truth in that when we look at where Germany is in regards to the pandemic, yet we must also appreciate that the numbers of the vaccinated are still too low. Even when we discount children and those who are unable to take the vaccine, how many Joshua Kimmichs are there in Germany, talking about evidence and questioning the science of vaccines, while leaving the door to the pandemic wide open? How long do we give preference to those who screech about the rights of the individual and willingly ignore the needs of the collective? Tyranny of the ill informed, idiocratic-despotism, is this were we really are? All the evidence seems to point in that direction, but then again, what has evidence ever done for the debate?

Image Credit

Photo by Matteo Jorjoson on Unsplash

Photo by Florian Schmetz on Unsplash

Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash

Photo by Massimo Virgilio on Unsplash