Last night (Thursday), ZDF (German public TV, Channel Two) around 10:15 ran one of it's primary public chat forums for about an hour (live). The Maybrit Illner Show. Normally, the show is dedicated to political topics. This time, it was about the virus outbreak.
Last night, they started off with a 8-minute piece by the Health Minister (he wasn't in the studio), where he answered around five or six questions posed. He was both in a warning mode, and in a reassurance mode.
Then it went to the panel of five virus experts and moderated by Illner.
At some point, Illner broke off the conversation and read some letter from a Chief Doctor of some lung clinic over at Saxony. The letter was rather blunt, and she limited her comments to roughly four lines. The doctor said that while there were beds in the clinic that could be put to use.....there was no way that they had the personnel to staff the place to the level required for some maximum type emergency like this. The hint was that you might end up in a hallway where forty rooms existed, but only four nurses to handle roughly eighty people.
Then she turned to some virus expert on the panel. His commentary was mostly that this virus will be around for days, weeks, months, and possibly years. He didn't have any positive comments to offer. Part of the real blame here is that Germany has become a nation of travelers.
If you ever attended some meeting of Germans.....among the main topics of conversation will be recent travels. So you might be sitting and kinda shocked that you are in the midst of twenty-five Germans, who in the past twelve months have been to seventy countries.
Some might admit to a spring week spent in southern Florida, and a fall trip to South Africa. One might admit to a North Korea trip (as crazy as it sounds). One might have spent three weeks on a bike crossing through the Congo. You might find a couple who were on a 40-day cruise around the Pacific and visited 22 countries. Some crazy German guy might admit that he went to a ranch in Australia and spent four weeks 'roughing it'.
Added to this comment about German travels....then you have so many thousands of non-Germans who arrive in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, or Munich each day....to have medical procedures done, buy the latest fashion, hang out and drink beer, and work on major 'deals'. There's probably a hundred Saudis or Kuwaitis who arrive weekly for serious medical work. From China (before the virus), I would make a bet that eight busloads of Chinese people arrived daily and went out on two-week tours of Germany. Hundreds of Australians fly into Germany around Oktoberfest to consume vast amounts of beer. There's probably forty New Zealanders who fly in daily to Frankfurt.....to experience zesty German lifestyles.
Is the threat about German hospitals correct....that they are not manned or equipped to a massive outbreak? Germans are business-like....they don't hire people to stand around and do nothing. So if they need only x-number of hospitals and x-number of nurses....then that's what they have on hand. I think Americans will discover the same situation in various states.
The one plus? Well....it has been bluntly pointed out that 85-percent of people with the virus are not going to see much more than a fever, a cough, and a down-time of seven days. These people don't need hospital care, and if you just keep them pumped up with fluids and ensure limited contact with people, then you've done a great job.
It's the other 15-percent of people, who you need to worry about....the folks who have lung issues, weak immune systems, were heavy-smokers for most of their lives, and will need real in-house hospital care.
It's going to be a rough year, and you might want to start practicing stringent sanitation habits....like washing your hands thirty times a day, and using alcohol wipes continually when using the subway or buses.
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