Pass the salt: The minute details that helped Germany build virus defences

[CG1 Blue]

23 hours ago, snoop1130 said:

The Jan. 22 canteen scene was one of dozens of mundane incidents that scientists have logged in a medical manhunt to trace, test and isolate infected workers so that the regional government of Bavaria could stop the virus from spreading.

I agree the Germans appear to have done a great job containing the virus. Tracking the earliest case back to a salt shaker is impressive! 

 

But it baffles me how they have the time and the manpower to do all this testing and tracing, when most other countries can only just cope with treating those with the more serious symptoms. I mean, had Germany been preparing for a pandemic or something? 

Edited April 10, 2020 by CG1 Blue

[Muzzique]

2 hours ago, CG1 Blue said:

had Germany been preparing for a pandemic or something? 

Yes, they already had a plan and they just pushed the button to roll it out. Germans are great ones for planning and this has been in place since SARS. 

 

That included repatriation flights which ran for 3 weeks until 9 April. One flight per day from major cities in less developed countries at €99 direct to Frankfurt. From Thailand that was one flight per day from Bangkok and another daily from Phuket. They repatriated about 6000 people from each location.

[Hank Gunn]

German efficiency yes, but also a lot of luck. Had this woman been a tourist (as was most likely the case of the originator in Italy) then the story would probably be quite different.

From the OP:

”

The task of finding who had contact with her was made easier by Webasto workers’ electronic calendars – for the most part, all the doctors needed was to look at staff appointments.

 

“It was a stroke of luck,” said Wendtner, the doctor who treated the Munich patients. “We got all the information we needed from the staff to reconstruct the chains of infection.”

 

For example, case #1 - the first person in Germany to be infected by the Chinese woman - sat next to her in a meeting in a small room on Jan. 20, the scientists wrote.

”

[gk10002000]

On 4/9/2020 at 11:27 AM, Andrew65 said:

It's been suggested that Germany might have been reporting some CV deaths as deaths from underlying causes, so making their CV death rate look much lower, not sure how much truth there is in that?

The virus did not kill anybody.  People died from complications, heart gave out trying to push more blood to get more oxygen into the blood stream due to poor lung action.  Many deaths are often not attributed directly to a virus or other pathogen.  Many of the people may have died if they had a sever flu or rhino virus.  I bet their will be many legal battles popping up as people try to sue companies or workplaces or even cities or governments about being exposed.  And anytime law suits are involved, I can imagine contentious death certificates and people demanding special explicit wording on them.  There are billions of dollars on the line here so it is just a matter of time before legal actions start making the news