The title is also misleading, as Merkel does not have the power to decide such things. Well, at least not by the letter.
Bavaria declared a statewide emergency in part to be able to overrule and have a consistent guideline across all health departments.
The list of exceptions in NRW is completely crazy.
Not every state responds the same and follows the same routines, that's the federal structure for you and differences can be enormous depending on where it is.
Germany just began any serious action, and there is a 2 week lag before seeing any sort of impact.
In Poland we had a national lockdown a week ago (which you can see everywhere - empty streets and so on), and so far the numbers don’t reflect it at all.
As for locking people down, yes you can do it, it’s called a quarantine.
So I would expect to see first effects in new infection numbers over the coming week, with nearly full effect probably visible some time during the following one.
Most might have stayed at home but the 5% that didn't are still enough to spread it exponentially.
Home office has changed from being the exception to being the norm for a week now at my workplace (an IT company), and I've heard the same from members of my family working elsewhere (in non-IT businesses).
In the current circumstances, in a lot of places in the U.S. people are being told to stay home unless they have a specific, approved reason to go out. These are legal orders--not suggestions--that are ultimately upheld by the threat of force.
If things get really bad, we could see the National Guard deployed to enforce curfews and such. And there are other uses of force that are legal in emergency circumstances.
I assume things are similar in Germany and other European countries. The German government could order people to stay home under threat of fines or jail time, even if they haven't done so yet. (I'd be very surprised if this isn't the case.)
Now, I'm not saying the U.S. or Germany is equivalent to China or anything nonsensical like that. I just don't see why people need to keep saying we don't do this or that (e.g., use force) when we clearly do.
I don't have much optimism that people, on the whole, will do the right thing and self-quarantine. Being forced to stay home is probably the only thing that will work.
Which includes things like walking, running, & hiking with people at 6ft distance. Not sure how serious that is.
> These are legal orders--not suggestions--that are ultimately upheld by the threat of force.
They're also not getting enforced AFAIK, so not everyone's taking it seriously. I don't really have reason to think anybody's getting "forced" in the sense of threat-of-force.
This is the official statement, but some newspapers seem to have more details: https://www.polizei.bayern.de/news/presse/aktuell/index.html...
> The Oak Park order is in effect until April 3, which means local schools will be closed a week longer than the governor has commanded. While the order states that violations can result in a misdemeanor criminal charge, Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb said the goal is not to place people in jail, but rather to use the ordinance to explain the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:I-uzFm... (google cache due to paywall)
But I think anyone can agree that if it becomes a question of, say, millions of people dying unless people stay home for awhile that it would be okay for government to exercise that kind of authority.
Card sharing may account for low percentage of that perhaps.
So I'd trust about 50% of people, perhaps. I guess this number rises, as the effects of the crisis are getting more severe and immediate.
Google translate:
> COVID19CZ's IT Initiative has put together anonymised card payment data at merchants. They show that people do not comply with the mandated quarantine, but also that many Czechs are still in risk areas. Article
Those arriving from Italy are going to quarantine for two weeks, the government announced on Friday 6 March. The measure began to apply from Saturday. That person was supposed to report on the phone to his general practitioner, who decided on quarantine on Monday. If returning Czechs have taken this step, it is not clear, but their payment data shows that 46 percent of people quarantined at least once in the first week in the first week.
“We can look at the number of people who paid with a card for one week in Italy and the next one in the Czech Republic. It can be seen from payment transactions that such people often went somewhere in the Czech Republic and bought something, ”says Petr Bednařík from DataSentics, who is part of the initiative of several Czech technology companies and IT enthusiasts COVID19CZ. It focuses on helping to combat a new type of coronavirus pandemic.
His analytical group, consisting of DataSentics and Keboola, works with leading Czech financial institutions. The analysis of Czech payment card activities abroad was based on Dateio data.
[...]
Wait until you will (chance of avoiding it I think is really small)
Except it's been shown time and time again that people can't be trusted to do the right thing.
There are many other good examples, like driving, over-the-counter medications, and firearms, for example. The fact that 56,000 people each year in the US end up in an ER because of acetaminophen overdose is not a good reason to ban Tylenol from being sold.
The argument is that those who do cause issues cause them in a disproportionate manner that it makes total sense to ban it outright. It is 100% the logical thing to do.
The Tylenol argument doesn't make sense because it is a medicine that can have good come out of it. Alcohol is dangerous, and it mainly exists for companies to profit hugely from it (it's sufficient to watch the lewd ads around alcohol to know what's going on).
I think you will find that human manufacture and consumption of alcohol predates the idea of companies. You seem to be letting your personal biases about it affect your beliefs, for example:
> It is 100% the logical thing to do.
This is not some logical, objective fact, but is actually your opinion. It's fine to have the opinion that it should be banned; to present it as "the logical thing" is another.
I know it does. However, we know better now, and there is no logical reason to consume it. In fact, the risks to consumption are much higher now. People operate heavy machinery, drive cars, own guns, have "college parties", etc. And we routinely see the disasters that happen because of it.
Large alcohol companies, however, are pushing for consumption purely for monetary aspects. Who cares about the negative effects on society as long as they're pocketing all the profit?
It's logical to ban it precisely because of all the negative things that come out of it, and almost no positives. The negatives strictly outweigh the positives, and hence the logical thing to do is do ban it. Don't we make the same argument about vaccines? Their positives far outweigh their negatives, so we require them. It's just the other way around here.
This is opinion, not fact, and to use terms like “strictly” and “logical” is to attempt to pass off your own subjective personal opinion as objective, impersonal mathematical fact.
Don’t do that. It’s intellectually dishonest. For most people, alcohol’s benefits far outweighs its harms.
I’m sorry that you have had such negative experiences with it to be biased in this way.
No one ever came to test them, after multiple pleas. The two weeks ran out some time ago.
The test is a simple polymerase chain reaction (PCR), however, the number of PCRs that some labs have to perform has increased by an order of magnitude. The utilization of the required machines and the number of qualified lab scientists are now bottlenecks. This is why tests results often take a couple of days now.
We should see faster lab results in the coming weeks as labs are equipped with more machines and staff is retrained. However, this is also of course dependent on the increase of tests.
So most results we see today are about ~9-10 days old if we combine that with “when did first symptoms appear?” survey in the Chinese study (results were often 5-10 days before visiting the hospital when the tests are first initiated). Then on top of that some people take up to 5 days to show the first symptom.
So any data you see today could easily be 2 weeks old. 1 week would be an ideal target in the short term, depending on where your goalposts are...
* "everyone" being a large enough population in the world where heard immunity is achieved, probably something around 90%