Anne Will’s group met the evening after the Chancellor Prime Minister’s decision for a new lockdown, from Wednesday until January 10th. Will’s question to the guests: “Will Germany manage the turnaround with the lockdown?” It was clear that it will not continue like this. Trust in the lockdown light has proven to be deceptive, and according to Markus Söder, Corona has “gotten out of control”.
So now a second emergency stop, only small private meetings, schools, shops, hairdressers, hotels being closed. Slogan: stay at home.
Two of the talk guests, both connected, had participated in the video conference with Angela Merkel themselves, Armin Laschet (CDU), Prime Minister of the severely affected North Rhine-Westphalia, and Manuela Schwesig (SPD), Prime Minister of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, who has done better so far. Both demonstrated their full support for the measures. Why now? Why not from Monday? So asked Anne Will as the megaphone of many in the country.
Laschet referred to the recommendations of the Leopoldina and praised the current “powerful signal”, Schwesig explained that it was first to ask parliament. But the retrospective subjunctive game – what would it have needed – was quickly off the table. Laschet appealed urgently to the common sense of the shopping population in the short period of time before the lockdown – there would be more controls in pedestrian zones. Schwesig warned that the “protection week before Christmas” should be used consciously before the families meet with grandparents. A key question was who was allowed to meet with how many, and how.
“It would be honest: only the bare minimum!” Clearly the warning from the medical doctor Uwe Janssens, who has been President of the Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine since 2019. Christmas as the festival of love means today to show one’s love through the “protection of others”. What is needed is a “pervasive and lasting lockdown”, as practiced in Finland or Ireland.
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Respect and sometimes embarrassment triggered the example next door. Will showed Tübingen’s alternative way through the crisis with a single player: rapid tests in all retirement homes, pensioners are allowed to use taxis at the bus rate, and only they are allowed to shop between nine and eleven in the morning. There have hardly been any serious cases in the student city for weeks. And Anne Will wanted to know why the Tübingen model was not being copied. Laschet and Schwesig think it is “good and right”, something of which can definitely be adopted. Uwe Janssens boldly demanded that the model should become “nationwide standard”.
Data protection remains an issue
Julian Nida-Rümelin, philosophy professor and member of the German Ethics Council, would like to go even further. He is bothered by the fear of using effective tracking apps, which have been very successful in tracking chains of infection in Asian countries such as Singapore and Taiwan. Looking at the consequences of the pandemic for the rest of the world is also ethical when millions of people are starving due to interrupted supply chains. Hence Nida-Rümelin’s urgent plea for better apps.
As liberal as Germany is, the right to informational self-determination should not be valued higher than protection against dangerous infections. It is wrong to “make data protection absolute”. The guests from the coalition reacted in a friendly and evasive manner, they made an effort, they know the arguments. Now it’s about the coming weeks, said Laschet, we’ll see. Surely the audience would have liked to know more here. The year of crisis is also the year of collective learning, and also, as Nida-Rümelin noted, a great math course for everyone.
If you’ve listened to Kristina Dunz, then contemporaries might have become thoughtful, who continue to go to mulled wine parties without hesitation or just pull their masks under their noses in the supermarket. Dunz, editor in the Berlin office of the “Rheinische Post”, visited her old mother with her husband at the beginning of October. Little did the couple suspect that both were infected. When that found out after the visit, the concern was enormous. It was luck and chance that the mother was not infected. While waiting anxiously for her test, Kristina Dunz became existentially clear: “It is very difficult to feel responsible then.”
