Are people really bickering about the price of this? Please tell me you're just German developers angry you didn't get this contract.

Because the alternative is that you're terrible at math.

According to[0], the costs of the pandemic for the German economy are from 255 to 729 billion euros. Taking the middle of 500 billion as a best guess, and a quick division will tell us that this app will be worth it if it stops one in every 25,000 infections.

Or, alternatively: this app costs about 0.25€ for every citizen, or about a quarter of one mask. That does not strike me as a terrible deal.

The point here isn't that this is a model for how all government procurement should be run. It is not.

It's that under the specific circumstances, overpaying is completely acceptable if it meant, for example, getting a contract signed a day earlier. Note that situation was obviously far worse when this project started than it is now.

[0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

You're right of course. My point was rather that you cannot simply say it's worth a single effort because the total net benefit of all measures is positive. Thanks for doing the math. Quite interesting result.

The worst case is that this app has negligible impact and even if it did, trying it as a strategy that helps fight Corona is still worth €20m.

Paying students €500 a month as emergency help will cost hundreds of millions and this is a single miniscule effort in a package of several hundred BILLION Euros.

Discussing the cost of this app with the given circumstances is a complete waste of time. It's a literal rounding error in the overall Corona bill for Germany alone.

Ah, then I may have misunderstood the sentiment. In that case, please excuse the (passive-?)aggressive tone of my post.

And yes, the link is just the result of some hyperactive copy&paste.

I'll now try to enjoy the thought that the Germans are bickering about the price of this on HN. It's sort of a return to normalcy: the luxury of caring about pointless details precisely because the government isn't quite as incompetent as always assumed, at least compared to some others.

If you assume a linear relationship between economic damage and number of infections.

This! The economic damage is largely caused by our response to the infection risk, rather than by the infections themselves. There are numerous countries with enormous economic damage and very few infections, and others with large numbers of infections and relatively less economic damage. They don't seem to be particularly correlated.

Completely OT and just out of curiosity: Is there a point to posting the source as a redirect via Google? Or is it simply the link copied from the search results page?

Germany has done better than most countries, and we need to throw everything at the problem including the kitchen sink. This is noy time for meanongless bickering, its the time to enable folks with a plan and then access them on their merits.

The well of criticism is endless. There are voices arguing that masks are useless, that 'Churchill wouldn't wear one' and that 'social distancing is communism'. Dealing with all of them will result in brain damage.

It will absolutely be 0, I didn't mean to imply otherwise.