Tests

  My wife (German in nature) works for a company that asks each employee to do the 'quickie' self Covid test at home twice a week (usually Monday and Thursday).  They actually buy the kits (probably a case of 500 of them....Chinese-made of course) and just hand them out via the office breakroom.  So each week, she brings two kits into the house and stacks them on the kitchen table.

My job, as 'technician-to-all-geeky-matters'....is to open one kit up on the mornings required, and conduct the test on her.  It takes roughly three minutes to get a 'mark' (you just hope and pray it's one single negative mark and not the double-mark-meaning-positive).  She takes a picture of the results, and reports this to the company secretary, who keeps some record if the government guys ever come to audit the company.  

German kids basically do the same thing at school.  They arrive on a Monday morning.....each has a kit on his/her desk, and prepares for the procedure.  You can probably blindfold most German kids and they've done it enough to do it without seeing the kit.  A positive result?  Well...that makes things interesting in the class. Because false positives do occur, you usually get a second kit and hopefully it slips over to the negative side.

Otherwise?  You get hustled out of the class.....a call goes to the parents, and you end up at some clinic for the PCR test.  

All this self-testing satisfactory for train and bus mandates?  WELL....NO.  That's the amusing thing.  Companies and schools will accept the self-test.  The police, bus people, and train authorities won't accept self-tests, and you are supposed to show up for citizen's test labs (free of course) IF you don't have the vaccination or are not recovered.  You boarded a bus at 7 AM and a ticket/Covid test audit is done, and you haven't completed the citizen's test lab....you will get invited to a court-house situation and likely fined.  

Hurting the public transportation sector?  If you are a non-vax person....the odds are that you've given up on buses and trains, and will use a motorcycle, bike or car to reach work each day.  On the trust-level, you probably have given up some positive view of the system.

How long will this heighten situation continue?  I would assume until we reach early April when the numbers will decrease and public fascination will drop like a rock.