Can you smell a bottle of vicks? Just wondering because it’s such a strong smell

I don't have any, but I can get a tingle in my sinus if I smell vinegar, but can't really pick up its aroma.

That’s got to be an interesting sensation, to feel the tingle that you know is vinegar but not actually smell it.

With proper contact tracing on check-in, regular airing out and reduced capacity, I think that restaurants could be kept open, at least in low-incidence regions.

Yes, online shopping would be a good thing during a pandemic if not for the distortive effect on the competition in the field. It's really biting us in the ass that we have not established ways of properly taxing Amazon & co yet.






Too early to tell. During the first wave in spring, we only had very little excess mortality. For recent weeks, the data isnt available yet. Our Federal Office of Statistics provides an ad-hoc estimate spanning until mid-November:


In the last week with available data, we had 19161 deaths, while the average of the years 2016-2019 was 17817, which yields an excess mortality of 7.5%. However, our cases only started spiking in October, and due to the ~2-3 week lag of the deaths behind the infections, this surge was not fully reflected in the deaths at that point in time:

As you can see, covid deaths have been 2-3 times as high recently as they were in mid-November.

Some scientists tried to model our excess mortality such that they can give predictions until the end of the year. Their conclusion is that Germany as a whole will see no pronounced excess mortality in 2020, but this average clouds a significant age stratification: there is excess mortality among the 80+ age group, no excess mortality among the 60-79 group, and a reduced mortality among the 35-59 group - presumably due to less traffic and travelling this year. On aggregate, the slightly increased mortality among people 80+ and the reduced mortality among the mid-aged group nearly cancel each other out.
https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/corona-wie-hoch-ist-die-uebersterblichkeit,SJ3eUq5
https://www.rtl.de/cms/muenchener-professor-2020-bisher-keine-ausgepraegte-uebersterblichkeit-in-deutschland-4669171.html

I dont know how up to date these findings are though; we had stable infection numbers for around a month as a result of our half-assed, so-called "lockdown light" which was in effect since early November, but then, cases suddenly started to go up rapidly again at the beginning of last week:

This unexpected surge will not be reflected in this year's excess mortality, but numbers in January will presumably be bad.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 15 2020 01:24pm

Contact tracing on check-in is not possible for an average restaurant.

Reduced capacity is meaningless indoors. When you are in a room for an hour there is no safe distance. The 6 foot with mask rule is for transient exposure. Sitting stationary around a spreader basically means you need to be a hundred feet away.

With contact tracing on check-in, I meant that the guests leave their names and address and time of visit at the restaurant, so that everyone who was there at the questionable time can be tested as soon as someone is tested positive in the following days. Afaik, South Korea and Japan use a similar system with dedicated phone apps.

Many restaurants have semi-separate rooms or segments which could be sealed off from one another with a screen. Alternatively, doors and windows could be left open if temperatures are mild enough.

We've got c.65k official covid deaths but judging by excess deaths it's nearing 80k. It's hard to see Germany hitting those sort of figures but with c.23k deaths and close to 30k excess deaths you'll probably end up with around half the deaths per capita as the worst hit countries. Not the success stories of some asian countries, but still far better than most other Western nations.

Yeah, but that's because we only started fucking things up really badly at the end of the year. The deaths associated with our worst weeks of the calender year in terms of infection numbers will only occur in January. When it comes to the total sum of excess deaths over the course of the pandemic, we're still carried by having dealt with the first wave much better than Italy/Spain/France/UK. During the current second wave, we're not really doing much better. Numbers in the UK are starting to go up again though, so the effect of the short lockdown you guys had a couple of weeks ago already seems to be fading.


edit:

Meh, not really something to be proud of. That's like winning the special olympics.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 15 2020 01:53pm

Disagree, definitely something to be proud of. As you have said there are absolutely differences in authoritative measures the west can perform vs Asian countries.

Germany is a boss and Merkel deserves praise imo

Not really Merkel's achievement. Like in the U.S., the heads of our federal states have most of the authority over public health measures, not the head of the federal government. And a lot of the suggestions Merkel made which leaked to the press were crappy. She's trying her best to lead, I'll give her that, but she's a lame duck at this point.

Also, please note that you, and presumably many others who read this thread, still underestimate how badly Germany fucked things up over the past 10 weeks. Your impression of how well Germany has handled the pandemic is still dominated by our successful response in spring. But like I explained in great detail in my long rant a couple of pages ago, our utter failure on... well... everything during the current wave confirms what I had been saying all along: that we got over the first wave so well back in spring was, in large part, luck rather than skill.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 15 2020 03:00pm