In rows, politicians are now "surprised by the dynamism" of the corona numbers. How can that be?

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Today's incidence only becomes noticeable in the intensive care units with a shift

Photo: Christoph Burgstedt / iStockphoto / Getty Images

July 8, 2021: The Olympic Games in Tokyo should take place without an audience, it has now been decided. Britney Spears is in a guardianship dispute with her father. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) publishes a so-called epidemiological bulletin with mathematical modeling of epidemiological events in the coming months. An article contained therein with the title "What vaccination quota is necessary to control Covid-19?" Comes to the conclusion:

»An increasing dominance of the delta variant can be expected in the coming weeks. This will have an impact on intensive care bed occupancy especially if the vaccination rates for 12–59 year olds stagnate at 75 percent or even 65 percent and at the same time they are completely opened. The lower the vaccination rates achieved in autumn, the less basic hygiene measures are sufficient if the delta variant dominates and further measures to reduce contact would be necessary. The summer should therefore be used urgently to achieve a vaccination rate of 85 percent for 12–59 year olds and 90 percent for ≥ 60 year olds as quickly as possible. "

July 17, 2021: The Belgian Wout van Aert wins the individual time trial on the 20th stage of the Tour de France. While Federal President Steinmeier in Erftstadt, North Rhine-Westphalia, expresses his condolences to the victims of the flood disaster, the Chancellor candidate Laschet laughs in the background. The Berlin mobility researcher Kai Nagel publishes a report to the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in which a fourth corona wave is predicted: "According to our simulations, an exponential increase in hospital numbers will start in October."

July 23, 2021: Chancellor Merkel decides to travel to Bayreuth for the opening of the Wagner Festival.

The virologist Drosten warns because of the low vaccination rate and calls for more information work to be done, »also in the private sphere, so that the vaccination rate increases faster.

This reduces the likelihood of repeated painful interventions in winter. "

Four months later.

November 10, 2021: In an interview with the BR program “Controvers”, the Bavarian Prime Minister Söder statesmanlike: “It is very impressive that almost all virologists, epidemiologists and scientists do not really understand the impact of this new wave in its force and speed have assessed. "

Södern until the doctor comes

Film tear.

A big question mark: What else should the RKI, Drosten and other virologists have done so that their warnings are taken seriously?

Would you have had to change the modeling to get more attention?

The RKI was about one to two weeks wrong in the scenario that has now occurred and calculated with the current, low vaccination rate, but the current curve was precisely drawn.

The real or skillfully acted surprise on a political level is accordingly of almost imposing audacity, "Surprised by the dynamics" became my personal hate formulation, which was adopted almost word for word by various actors.

How can you be "surprised" by a "dynamic" in calculated curves?

The joke about an exponential curve, for example, is that it is exponential at every point and not "suddenly" at the very end.

There is little more predictable than exponential curves (of course: the amen in the church).

Accordingly, it is semantic folly to speak of exploding numbers as if the numbers were stun grenades thrown from ambush.

And purely practical: How can you be "surprised" by a "force" with exactly the same arrangement as in the previous year, with a seasonal repetition with looser control conditions?

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Germany's corona disaster and the alliance of the unreasonable: an idiotic situation of national importance

The Bavarian Health Minister Klaus Holetschek also performed the surprise of a person who walks into the forest and is overwhelmed by the unexpectedly large number of trees: "I believe that we are currently experiencing a dynamic that was really unpredictable."

Brandenburg's Prime Minister Dietmar Woidke topped this turmoil when he revealed in an RBB interview last week: "I was told that such a dynamic has never been seen in this pandemic."

Warnings faded

And while triage officially begins in Austria, with five doctors and a lawyer deciding who will be rescued and who not, and corpses are piled up in hospital corridors, local politicians also allow themselves the luxury of being completely ignorant.

The state health councilor Christine Haberlander also claims: "We had an almost normal summer and then there was an unbelievable dynamic increase that definitely surprised everyone."

But there was also a strong warning in Austria in July - while Chancellor Kurz declared the pandemic to be over.

And the new Federal Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg also joins the tradition of calculating dynamic ignorance: "The experts did not foresee the form of this dramatic dynamic that we are now seeing".

But he is not entirely wrong: Nobody could have foreseen how dramatically the auto-destructive pleasure of some people would develop, who would rather take a de-wormer for horses than accept a vaccination;

or who willingly get infected at corona contagion parties in order to be considered recovered afterwards - and die in the process.

German clinics are now reaching their capacity limits.

In the distance we can still hear an echo of Marco Buschmann's voice, who declares the epidemic situation to be over, as no overburdening of the health system is to be expected.

Which broken crystal balls do you work with in government circles?

Oppressive, disturbing, avoidable

We repeat the "surprising" second wave of last year, only in "more powerful", "more dynamic" and even "more surprising" - and more oppressive and disturbing, because this fourth would have been avoidable.

But political mismanagement, wishful thinking, a lack of courage and the obvious inability to read curves are steering an entire country into the "hardest Christmas the post-war generations have ever experienced" - again.

The stupid thing about it: The incidence of today only becomes noticeable in the intensive care units with a shift.

That is, we can no longer solve the problems that we will now have - for which our future selves will rightly hate us.

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Health Minister Jens Spahn on the Corona situation: "Compulsory vaccination would tear our country apart" An interview by Melanie Amann and Cornelia Schmergal

If we have learned anything in the almost two years of the pandemic, it is that at least three things are particularly important in containing it: acting quickly, acting strategically when acting quickly - and acting quickly.

Early action is the biggest problem here: The warnings from RKI & Co. were issued at a time of subjectively perceived security.

An "autumn problem" should have been solved in the summer - and politics no longer hates anything, because it works according to a logic of short-term interest management.

For fear of asking too much of the population, especially shortly before a federal election, it was necessary to wait until the problem became so present that politics could no longer be seen as a bogeyman - just reality.

And then you can pretend to be surprised.

A more determined vaccination campaign would not have been unreasonable.

A bigger mobilization would have helped so much in the summer.

Misjudgments, opportunism, procrastination

Because due to misjudgments, opportunism or procrastination, action was not taken quickly, early, or strategically (it started with the masks, continued with "closed schools vs. open offices", went on to billing the tests and closing the Vaccination centers up to the timid vaccination campaign), was negligently set for a long time with the false hope of "everything will be fine somehow!"

After this deliberate repression, only the most brutal means remain in the current situation: compulsory vaccination, lockdown or the cynical acceptance of the dead.

However, the common politician is even more reluctant to deal with these measures than any previous one, which is why the simplest rhetorical branch now remains that of the diffusion of responsibility and mock naivety.

And we can just choose whether dishonesty or incompetence is the reason.

November 14, 2021. Katrin Göring Eckardt tweeted: "It remains tragic that so little was prepared for this situation."

A columnist in Munich throws her laptop out of the window screaming.