In Germany, for months....you had free Covid-19 testing going on. The government, in it's wisdom, decided that it would cover the 18-Euro per test per person. Some folks were testing two and three times a week. Personally, I used the service one single time over the past six months.
Well....N-TV picked up the topic today, and said that there is a secret report going around the government that the free tests will end....shortly after the federal election in late September.
On the topic of cost....they say that roughly 3.4-billion Euro was paid out to cover the free tests from April to July of this year.
The push here? If you have free vaccinations....you are protected and don't need tests to confirm anything.
All of this....to push the non-vax crowd into the corner? More or less.
The problem I see....even if you are vaccinated....you can still get Covid. So when you come up with symptoms (as a vaccinated guy)....you'd have to go to get tested (probably via your doctor or local clinic....not the quickie-test centers). Healthcare insurance will cover that (you could call it free, but it's not really free)..
What I'll predict here is a economic slowdown from October to December of enormous proportions, all leading to non-vax folks just refusing to spend their money at theaters, restaurants, etc....who demand either a paid test result or a digital vax deal.
The new government (after the election) walking into January through March....with serious tax revenue and business revenue missing? They will have to blame the non-vax crowd, and eventually re-invent the whole free testing business....to get tax/business revenue back to the norm.
You can laugh over the sequence here and the solutions mentality, but this is the new economic world that Germany wanders through.
As for my last thought? The reliability of these quickie-test centers being marginal? Well....this has been brought up in Hamburg.....tested, and it's a fairly serious problem over 'false-positives' that you get with the whole free-testing business. Anytime you attach 'free' to something....it usually ends up meaning crap to the participant.
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