As a Berliner, I've had the chance to see the German response from the frontlines. I've never seen such socially responsible citizens. Every once in a while my friends and family from US/UK/Asia etc call and ask me what's the secret of Germany's success. The response from German govt. was perfect in such situation, you can't help others without securing your position.
I think that the big issue that was exposed was not lack of centralization but too much of it with the wrong organizations. A nation of 330 odd million is much harder to govern especially in a centralized manner.
an additional question I have is what do you think has been so awful about the United States response? From a pure numbers perspective I feel like the US isn't really doing badly from a per capita basis.
Nobody has run out of ventilators yet. Infection rates are below the 95% confidence interval of the original models. Just curious as to your perspective. Do you think that these numbers are due to bad models and luck or due to the fact that the population has largely adhered to social distancing?
The US now is catching up fairly well as the country started playing on its strengths, such as the extremely strong industrial base, financial power and, for better or worse, international leverage.
Regarding the more centralized system, it has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of Germany's central coordination is that it made generally good decisions from the get go, so the country was able to move quicker. The US had a confused central response and the states were able to implement local fixes that prevented the entire system from falling apart.
So I think the US model has the advantage of offering a second layer of defense from poor central planning, which perhaps wouldn't be as easy in Germany (I'm speculating here, I don't know much about Germany democratic guards against bad central decisions).
A key difference though is that most of German healthcare is public; there are very few private clinics and those play no major role in the pandemic response.
Insurance is mandatory but cheap (and independent of employment). Healthcare is accessible no matter your budget and maybe in the pandemic nearly as important, everyone has the right to sick leave. You get s doctor's certificate and can stay home for a week or two or three, if needed. You also won't be fired for it as labour protections are strong.
This was a problem in Germany as well. End of January, the German minister of health still said that Corona is not as bad as the yearly Influenza.
> until relatively late in the process, and our testing ramp up was also very slow.
Ramping up testing was also very slow in the beginning and highly chaotic.
> Forced to suspend the launch of a nationwide detection program for the coronavirus for a month, the C.D.C. lost credibility as the nation’s leading public health agency and the country lost ground in ways that continue to haunt grieving families, the sick and the worried well from one state to the next.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/cdc-coronavirus-la...
Why base your opinion on a second order result rather than first hand outcomes? If we had not tested at all, and still had this _drastically better than predicted_ result, might you still be unhappy about it?
And the NYT... They are not just a news orginization. Still run by the BBC's Mark Thompson I see.
I always joke about the love-hate relationship between Italy and Germany (Italy and Germany in the broader sense, not only the actual countries) saying that this feeling has been here since the times of general Stilicho [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilicho].
Slightly off-topic, but you want to write "General" with a capital G in this case because you're referring to a concrete general. I had trouble parsing your sentence because I took "general" to be an adjective.
Also in the case of the ESM I guess you are accurate that they were offered money that they didn't want, but you didn't note why they didn't want it, which I guess is probably important https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
You can't have a workable monetary union without a fiscal union. Germany wouldn't have such a big surplus if its exports weren't massively boosted by the southern states depressing the exchange rate of the Euro. Unions require unity, and if Germany feels like its pulling more than its own weight, it can exit. But you see exactly the opposite, Germany (at least nominally) states that its goal is to preserve the union, and this betrays the fact that the union brings massive advantages for the German economy. It is not out of a sense of benevolence and european solidarity, but of pure self-interest.
Well, if Germany and the North want the union to survive, they will have to treat it like a real partnership and respect and recognize the contribution of their other partners.
The current "solution" of bailing out Italy and Spain with even more debt on the condition of further future austerity will only lead to further instability, unemployment, discontent and financial ruin when the debts come due.
It is not a question of "solidarity" with the South. It is a question of whether the North recognizes the contribution of its partners to the union, and whether they can act in mutual self-interest to save it.
In a monetary union, the regions running a surplus enjoy a massive boost due the exchange rates being depressed by the regions running a deficit, while the industries of the deficit regions struggle to catch up, hampered by the lack of natural corrective forces of a floating exchange rate. If a monetary union has to work, the deficit regions have to be fiscally supported by the surpluses generated elsewhere, or they just spiral further and further into debt, unemployment and industrial collapse.
$1 now buys you a mere €0.92
https://blogs.imf.org/2018/02/21/the-euro-area-needs-a-fisca...
Yet, if you take the 2017 budget [1] for example, nearly half of the net contributions (excluding the UK) were paid by Germany.
The ESM has historically some bad reputation in my country, mainly in relation to Greece (I'm aware the ESM did not exist at the time, but most of the comparisons are drawn to that in our media). The government did not want it, or so they said, but in the end signed the agreement anyway (although I don't know if they'll ask for the money or not).
OTOH the help was a bit lackluster, especially at the beginning. I’m not sure about the “hundreds” of patients —- it’s probably closer to 100 than it is to 1,000 especially when only considering Italian patients. In any case it’s fairly symbolic considering the scale of this in Italy.
The cause of all this was probably bad timing more than any unwillingness to help. As Italy was most in need, cases in Germany were also growing explosively. There was probably just too much going on, and too much uncertainty to easily part with resources that might be needed rather soon.
> All while high ranking officials from Italy called Germans Nazis multiple times
There has never been a serious discussion in Germany about its failed post-WW2 denazification programme, history got in the way. Just yesterday I was on the wikipedia page of the first commander of the Gestapo, a certain Rudolf Diels, only to learn that immediately after WW2 he led quite a peaceful life, perfectly integrated in the German state institutions:
> After 1950 he served in the post-war government of Lower Saxony[3] and then in the Ministry of the Interior, until his retirement in 1953.
Like, what the hell?
Even on the economy side you've still got BASF and Bayer happily doing business of hundreds of billions each year, while suffering almost no economic repercussions as a result of their role in WW2.
One of the few Germans from the public sphere that I know of and who really wanted to confront this problem head on was Heinrich Böll.
I am quite skeptical as to „never“. The example you give is an infuriating one and there are too many of those. But that there has been no discussion about de-nazification is simply not true. In academia the topic definitely has been dealt with. See for example this article by the Centre for political education [0] which I consider an example of making this available to the public.
Also these efforts didn’t happen in a vacuum, Europe and Germany was in ruins, the allies wanted to wrap them up as well. Ironically the Sowjets were more drastic than the Western allies with their efforts, and we’ve ended up with a second totalitarian regime in Eastern Germany. They’ve even re-used the concentration camps.
Anyhow. I remember talking about this in school and critically discussing the History of Germany in the last century. We must not forget, we must not repeat.
[0]: https://m.bpb.de/geschichte/nationalsozialismus/dossier-nati...
I assume you mean ventilators since it would be fairly insulting otherwise, especially when considering Germany's knee-jerk reactions to the initial outbreak in Italy.
Germany gave away many hundreds of respirators, took in hundreds of patients from all neighboring countries (including Italy). Italy was offered money under the ESM which they didn't want. All while high ranking officials from Italy called Germans Nazis multiple times. All that although the Italian population has a higher median wealth, lower taxes, higher rate of home ownership and lower retirement age.
And we're still the bad guys.