Germany

We have often heard over the past weeks how Germany’s impressive testing capacity has proven central to combating the coronavirus at such speed. But equally impressive is the speed at which its state and federal governments have reacted financially to save the economy. Like some of the UK’s support schemes, Germany has provided various aid packages or Soforthilfe to businesses large and small. Unlike the UK, however, Germany has already managed to pay out billions of euros to those in need. For the self-employed and small businesses with up to ten workers, this has essentially meant free money arriving in their bank accounts within 24 hours of applying, for which they

Could China have done more to prevent the coronavirus pandemic? One tabloid editor in Germany certainly thinks so and an extraordinary bust-up has broken out between the Chinese government and his newspaper as a result. The row kicked off last week when Bild – the best-selling paper in Germany – published an editorial entitled ‘What China owes us’, calling for China to pay reparations of £130 billion for the damage done by the outbreak of the virus.  Later that day, the Chinese embassy in Berlin then responded with an open letter saying ‘we regard the style in which you ‘campaign’ against China in your current report on page two as infamous… Those

Asked at Tuesday’s evening briefing why Germany appears to have a lower coronavirus death rate than Britain, the Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty said: ‘We all know that Germany got ahead in terms of its ability to do testing for the virus, and there’s a lot to learn from that.’ Germany has the capacity for 500,000 tests a day, while our own government is promising only 100,000 tests a day by the end of April. As has been explained here and elsewhere many times before, the more people you test, the lower your infection mortality rate will be – for the simple reason that you will be dividing your deaths

Over the past few weeks there has been widespread curiosity about the German healthcare system. Since the coronavirus outbreak, the infection curve in Germany has risen just as steeply as in Italy, and the measures it has imposed are quite similar to those elsewhere. Yet, its death rate is noticeably lower. Of 100,132 Germans who have tested positive, only 1,584 have died, as of this morning. Compared to fatality rates above 6 per cent in neighbouring France, Netherlands or Belgium, that seems remarkable. The most important reason for Germany’s rate is intense testing, using the South Korean model where widespread testing and isolation helped flatten the curve of new infections.

Is there something about being Germany which protects the body against coronavirus Covid-19? Probably not, I would guess. In which case why do the latest figures from the Robert Koch Institute show that the country has a case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.3 per cent, while the World Health Organisation (WHO) figures from Italy seem to show a CFR of 9 per cent? To say there is a vast gulf between those figures is an understatement. If nine per cent of people who catch Covid-19 are going to die from it we are facing a calamity beyond parallel in the modern world. If only 0.3 per cent of people who catch

Emmanuel Macron spoke for three hours, almost without pause, at the first of his grand débats national in Normandy last week, in an attempt to respond to recent protests, while 8,000 policemen kept the gilets jaunes at bay. Yesterday, in the splendour of the Palace of Versailles, Macron hosted scores of international business leaders, many on their way to Davos, to reassure them that France was open for business. They were polite but it is fair to say sceptical, having seen on television the Porsches of bankers burning on the streets of Paris. Today the peripatetic president is with Angela Merkel in the German city of Aachen, known still to