Germany – Common Infirmities

Scant progress

In the middle of an economic slowdown and a huge expansion in spending to reduce households’ winter fuel costs, the new UK government has just announced, in its new “mini-budget” its intention to drastically cut taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. Not surprisingly, the price of UK bonds has plummeted, and interest rates have risen to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Guardian quotes international market experts from ING saying this was a “perfect storm” for the UK, as “global markets shun sterling and gilts.” They continue

Price action in UK gilts is going from bad to worse. A daunting list of challenges has arisen for sterling-denominated bond investors, and the Treasury’s mini-budget has done little to shore up confidence.

“Little to shore up confidence” is such an elegant bit of English understatement, so extreme as to amount almost to deception. Like “the expanded hours for flight departures at Heathrow have done little to improve the noise pollution problem for residents near the airport” or “Herr Hitler’s new ‘Nuremberg Laws’ have done little to shore up confidence in fair treatment among Germany’s half million Jewish citizens.”

Riley in Odessa

While looking up something else in Uriel Weinreich’s Yiddish-English dictionary I came across the expression לעבן ווי גאָט אין אדעס — to live like God in Odessa — translated as “to live the life of Riley”.

I was familiar with the German expression Leben wie Gott in Frankreich — to live like God in France — with the same meaning, and I’d always assumed it was a reference to the large number of opulent houses that God has in France. But Odessa? It’s not a city I associate with cathedrals — though I’ve never been there. And would a Yiddish expression locate God’s dwelling in cathedrals? Is it originally a Russian expression? Presumably it’s connected to the German expression, but which came first? Maybe they both have nothing to do with cathedrals, but with a general opulence of lifestyle, in which God figures only as a kind of ironic hyperbole.

So many questions…

(Including about Riley. According to some sources the phrase goes back to a Sligo landowner Willy Reilly who found his way through to a contented and prosperous life after some ballad-worthy marital complications. There are no records of him ever having visited Odessa.)

Update on Delta in Germany

The Robert Koch Institute produces estimates of variants of concern on Wednesdays. My projection from two weeks ago turns out to have been somewhat too optimistic. At that point I remarked that there seemed to be about 120 delta cases per day, and that that number hadn’t been increasing: The dominance of delta was coming from the reduction of other cases.

This no longer seems to be true. According to the latest RKI report, the past week has seen only a slight reduction in total cases, compared to two weeks ago, to about 604/day. And the proportion of delta continues to double weekly, so that we’re now at 59%, meaning almost 360 Delta cases/day. The number of Delta cases has thus tripled in two weeks, while the number of other cases has shrunk by a similar factor. The result is a current estimated R0 close to 1, but a very worrying prognosis. We can expect that in another two weeks, if nothing changes, we’ll have 90% Delta, around 1100 cases in total, and R0 around 1.6.

Of course, vaccination is already changing the situation. How much? By the same crude estimate I used last time — counting single vaccination as 50% immune, and looking back 3 weeks (to account for the 4 days back to the middle of the reporting period, 10 days from vaccination to immunity, and another 7 days average for infections to turn into cases), the above numbers apply to a 40% immune population. Based on vaccinations to date the population in 2 weeks will be 46% immune, reducing the R0 for Delta to around 1.5. In order to push it below 1.0 we would need to immunise 1/3 of the remaining population, so we need at least 64% fully immunised. At the current (slowed) rate of vaccination, if it doesn’t decelerate further, that will take until around the middle of September, by which point we’ll be back up around 10,000 cases/day.

Delta may not mean change

Germany is in a confusing place with its pandemic developments. Covid cases have been falling as rapidly here as they have been rising in the UK: More than 50% reduction in the past week, dropping the new cases to 6.6 per 100,000 averaged over the week, under 1000 cases per day for the first time since the middle of last summer. At the same time, the Delta variant is rapidly taking over. Last week the Robert Koch Institute reported 8%, this week it’s 15%. Virologist Christian Drosten, speaking on the NDW Coronavirus podcast this week (before the new Delta numbers were available) spoke of the 80% level in England that, he said, marked the watershed between falling and rising case numbers.

I think this is the wrong back-of-the-envelope calculation, because it depends on the overall expansion rate of the virus, and the difference between Delta and Alpha, which is likely particularly large in the UK because of the large number of people who have received just one AstraZeneca dose, which seems to be particularly ineffective against Delta. There’s another simple calculation that we can do specifically for the German situation: In the past week there have been about 810 cases per day, of which 15.1% Delta, so, about 122 Delta cases per day. The previous week there were about 1557 cases per day, of which 7.9% Delta, so also about 123 Delta cases. That suggests that under current conditions (including weather, population immunity, and social distancing) Delta is not expanding. This may mean that current conditions are adequate to keep Delta in check, while Alpha and other variants are falling by more than 50% per week.

This suggests a very optimistic picture: that total case numbers will continue to fall. Within a few weeks Delta will be completely dominant, but the number of cases may not be much more than around 100 per day. And that ignores the increasing immunity: The infections reported this week occurred in the previous week, and the immunity is based on the vaccinations two weeks before that. With about 1% of the population being vaccinated every day, we should have — relative to the approximately 70% non-immune population* 20 days ago — already have about 15% reduced transmission by the first week in July. And at current vaccination rates we can expect, by the end of July that will be 30% reduced, providing some headroom for further relaxation of restrictions without an explosion of Delta cases.

That does raise the question, though, of why the general Covid transmission rate in Germany seems to be lower than in the UK. I don’t see any obvious difference in the level of social-distancing restrictions. Is it just the difference between single-dose AZ versus Biontech? If so, we should see a rapid turnaround in the UK soon.

* I’m very roughly counting each dose as 50% immunity.

Does a shot of vitamin B protect against Covid?

Thirty years ago there were some who envisioned a new united Germany combining the best of east and west: A vibrant market economy with an expanded commitment to economic justice, a confident democratic federal government balanced by a greater variety of states, and a commitment to individual liberty reinforced by the recent experience of dictatorship. A bridge between the solid democracy in America and the rising democracy in Russia.

Instead, Covid has revealed the modern Federal Republic as the combined worst of both systems: A timid central government in thrall to private business interests, unable to take decisive action to protect public health because of a lack of confidence that their authority would be seen as sufficiently legitimate. A resurgent right wing inspired by American and Russian ethnonationalists to express their individual liberty by rejecting even elementary public health measures. And now, a public vaccination campaign dominated by the financial and status needs of private physicians, and prioritising those people with high levels of what the East Germans called Vitamin B — “B” for “Beziehungen“, connections, the way scarce resources were distributed under socialism.

When the vaccination program started it was concentrated in large vaccination centres (Impfzentren). These were highly efficient, providing rapid throughput and simple logistics, and the official priorities of the Permanent Vaccination Commission (Ständige Impfkomission, or STIKO) — covering people over 60 years old, those with serious medical conditions putting them at elevated risk of Covid complications (including pregnant women and their companions), police, teachers, and government officials — could be securely monitored.

There were two major problems with this system: First, the physicians in private practice, for whom vaccinations were traditionally a great money spinner, felt that they were losing money and influence; Second, there was no unobtrusive path to providing priority immunisation to people who were important, influential, or just rich, threatening to lead to the sort of blatant corruption that just embarrasses everyone. This led the government* to bring the GPs into the vaccination program, paying them upwards of €50 per vaccine. The GPs, unsurprisingly, rushed to vaccinate their friends and favourite patients — particularly those patients with private insurance, who they are generally keen to hold on to, as the private insurance covers all manner of treatments that the public insurance won’t pay for, and the payment levels are generally significantly higher.

How should one respond to this? The Ethics commission is very concerned… that people who haven’t been clever enough to work the system might be jealous of the superior people who have. Here is a comment from a recent podcast interview with commission chair Alena Buyx:

AB: We shouldn’t confuse the people who have gone the extra mile and somehow managed to get it organised, or had a stroke of luck, with those who have cheated.
Spiegel: … It could be that someone who isn’t so resourceful… for various reasons, it could be social background, it could be language, it could be some lack of access to information –and I can understand that they might feel he or she feels like you’re taking something away from them.
AB: These are things that one couldn’t have imagined earlier. We have vaccine envy and also vaccine guilty conscience. But all I can say is: Good People, every vaccination is a good vaccination… Those who have been lucky, or who have profited from this “flexibility” — if they haven’t cheated anyone — they should enjoy their good fortune.

From there to full social Darwinism is just a small step, and that step was taken by one Christoph S. in the comments section of the national newspaper Die Welt:

In my social circle — definitely well off — is just about everyone vaccinated, and always the whole family, including the university-age children. None of them in the vaccination centre, always in the GP practice or through doctors they know personally. In other words, since the GPs have been doing vaccinations the prioritisation has fallen away de facto, at least for the “higher” levels of the population. This is not pretty, but as long as they’re managing to vaccinate up to a million people a day in Germany, I find it acceptable. One shouldn’t make a fuss about the people who try to cut ahead at the vaccination centres; Germany has much bigger problems than someone getting vaccinated a few days early. And, by the way, this is how it’s always been, that those who make the most noise prevail, and presumably that’s why Homo sapiens has managed to survive.***

* Just to be clear, this is not the official justification. This is a purely speculative exercise on my part. It’s hard to think of any other justification, though. It’s not as though the GPs were otherwise unoccupied, with huge amounts of spare capacity for taking on vaccination duty.

Continue reading “Does a shot of vitamin B protect against Covid?”

Is it Father day or Sonday?

Pietro Perugino, San Pietro Polyptych, 1496–1500, Christ's Ascension. — Sorry, bye, gotta go…

I just discovered that German Fathers’ Day (today) is identical with the national religious holiday Christi Himmelfahrt, or Feast of the Ascension. Thus is the recognition of fathers identified with the single most famous example in Western culture of a man abandoning his family to finish his work. And he was going to join up with his own “true” father, who (as he had just remarked) had already abandoned him.

How to vaccinate all the Germans in two easy steps

One might despair at how hopelessly behind Europe in general, and Germany in particular, is with its vaccination campaign. According to the data below from the Robert Koch Institute, they recovered last week from the collapse of the week before due to the brief rejection of the AstraZeneca vaccine, and resumed their very modest acceleration, but that seems to have stopped, and they’re now back to the rate of the previous week of about 1.5 million vaccines per week, a rate that would get them through the entire adult population in around… 2 years.

But not to worry! says Der Spiegel. They quote an expert — Sebastien Dullien, scientific director of the Institute for Macroeconomics and Economic Research (Institut für Makroökonomie und Konjunkturforschung (IMK) der Hans-Böckler-Stiftung), for which I’ll have to take their word that he’s somehow an expert on vaccines and public health, because his job (and his Wikipedia page) make it seem that he’s an expert on finance and economics — who claims that the vaccination of the entire German adult population will be complete before the middle of the summer. “Es ist realistisch, alle impfbereiten erwachsenen Deutschen bis Ende Juli durchgeimpft zu haben.” [It is realistic, that we can have all willing adult Germans vaccinated by the end of July.) Sounds good! He goes on to say “Dafür müssen nur zwei Bedingungen erfüllt werden.” [This depends on just two conditions being fulfilled.] Okay, two conditions. I hope the conditions are fulfilled… What are they?

Der Impfstoff muss kommen, und er muss verimpft werden.
[We have to get the vaccine, and then we have to vaccinate people with it.]

It’s this kind of reduction of complex problems into manageable sub-problems that only the truly great minds can deliver. This goes on my list of “How-to-do-it” solutions to complex problems. (Previous entries here, here, and here.)

Actually, this is amazingly close to the Monty Python original, where the kiddie show How to Do It explained “how to rid the world of all known diseases”. Their method was more elaborate, though, involving five steps:

First of all, become a doctor, and discover a marvelous cure for something. And then, when the medical profession starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right, so there will never be any diseases ever again.

The poisoned roots of German anti-vax sentiment

I’ve long thought it odd that Germany, where the politics is generally fairly rational, and science education in particular is generally quite good, has such broad acceptance of homeopathy and a variety of other forms of quackery, and a special word — Schulmedizin — “academic medicine” — to express a dismissive attitude toward what elsewhere would be called just “medicine”, or perhaps “evidence-based medicine”. I was recently looking into the history of this, and found that attacks on Schulmedizin — or “verjudete Schulmedizin” (jewified academic medicine) — were as much a part of the Nazi state science policy as “German mathematics” and “Arian physics”.

Medicine in the Third Reich remained a weird mixture of modern virology and pseudo-scientific “racial hygiene”. The celebrated physician Erwin Liek wrote

Es ist mein Glaube, dass das deutsche Volk berufen ist, nach und nach eine ganz neue, rein deutsche Heilkunst zu entwickeln.
(It is my belief, that the German people has a calling, gradually to develop a pure German art of healing.)

Liek was appealing for a synthesis of Schulmedizin with traditional German treatment. As with Arian physics*, and the Nazi state was careful not to push the healthy German understanding so far as to undermine important technology and industry. But the appeal to average people’s intuitive discomfort with modern science was a powerful propaganda tool that they couldn’t resist using, as in this 1933 cartoon “The vaccination” from Der Stürmer that shows an innocent blond arian mother uncomfortably watching her baby being vaccinated by a fiendish Jewish doctor. The caption reads “This puts me in a strange mood/Poison and Jews never do good.”

1933 Cartoon from Der Stürmer: Blond German mother looking concerned as a beastly Jewish doctor vaccinates her baby. Caption: "This puts me in a strange mood/Poison and Jews are seldom good." — 1933 Der Stürmer cartoon “The vaccination”.

Today’s anti-vaxers fulminating against Schulmedizin and the Giftspritze (poison shot) are not necessarily being consciously anti-Semitic, but the vocabulary and the paranoid conspiracy thinking are surely not unconnected.

* Heisenberg was famously proud of having protected “Jewish physics” from being banned at his university, considering himself a hero for continuing to teach relativity theory, even while not objecting to the expulsion of the Jewish physicists, and agreeing not to attach their names to their work. Once when I was browsing in the science section of a Berlin bookstore in the early 1990s a man started chatting with me, telling me that he had worked for decades as a radio engineer in the GDR, and then going on to a long monologue apropos of nothing about how wonderful Heisenberg was, and how he had courageously defended German science during the Third Reich.

Jack and the Beehive

It suddenly struck me that the English word beanstalk and the German word Bienenstock (beehive) sound powerfully like cognates, even though they are not. There are quite a lot of faux amis between English and German, and they are usually cognate, even when the meanings are radically different — as between the English fabric and the German Fabrik (factory), or the English stuff and the German Stoff (fabric). They have a common root, from which they have evolved differently. Even the bizarre Gift meaning “poison” started out as something given, a dose of medicine (dosis also from the Latin root for “given”).

But beanstalk and Bienenstock are both compound words made up of parts that both seem like they could be cognates, but actually are unrelated. That beans and bees are unrelated is unsurprising. It took me a bit of work to convince myself that stalk is etymologically unrelated to Stock, which is indeed cognate to the English stick. The roots are quite different: Stalk from Old English stale, meaning a handle or part of a ladder; Stock originally a branch or a treestump, presumably then a stump that houses bees, either naturally or agriculturally.

“Zelensky loves your ass”

There’s a lot of competition for the weirdest moments in the Ukraine bribery-extortion-political meddling affair that underlies the current impeachment hearings, but for me there’s not much that can compete with the testimony of diplomat David Holmes that he overheard hotel-magnate-cum-ambassador Gordon Sondland telling Trump that Zelensky would “do anything you ask for” because Zelensky “loves your ass”.

My first reaction on reading this — I may have understood it differently had I heard it spoken — was that it was most bizarre for a head of state to be commenting (favourably or unfavourably) on the intimate anatomy of the US president. And that Trump didn’t strike me as someone particularly concerned about his toned glutes.

I quickly realised that this is not actually an erotic compliment, but rather an application of the somewhat gangster argot that uses “ass” as a general intensifier. I am reminded of the section of Gravity’s Rainbow titled “On the phrase ‘ass backwards’”, where the literal-minded Berlin drug dealer Säure Bummer asks a group of AmericanS

Why do you speak of certain reversals — machinery connected wrong, for instance, as being “Ass backwards”? I can’t understand that. Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying “ass forwards,” if backwards is what you mean.

After a typical digression about umlauts and helicopters Seaman Bodine replies

“‘Ass’ is an intensifier, as in ‘mean ass’, ‘stupid ass’ — well, when something is very backwards, by analogy you’d say ‘backwards ass.’”
“But ‘ass backwards’ is ‘backwards ass’ backwards,” Säure objects.
“But gee that doesn’t make it mean forwards.”

I’m still not exactly sure what “he loves your ass” actually means and, in particular, whether it conveys an erotic charge.