As a foreigner living in Germany I could live with it if there were otherwise sound measures, but it's mostly been a bunch of wishful thinking. There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people really understood it as "corona is over". Even this I could understand, but this year they do the same thing again! Surprise, surprise that there is a…
> There was a rush last summer to open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early and a lot of people really understood it as "corona is over"
I totally agree. Last week saw a dentist and this morning (10:02) two sales ladies at a baker's embedded in an EDEKA supermarket with no mask, one of them coughing. When pointing out politely that they should really put their masks on, my comment of mine was ignored. The unfair thing is that it won't be these people dying, but likely third parties that did nothing wrong (like the elderly couple behind me in the queue).
There is a huge debate focusing on vaccination, about forcing people to do it etc., but schools are open, kindergardens are open (every parent knows that's where stuff spreads), people shop, socialise, eat together, work together almost if there was nothing going on.
The government failed to point out that vaccinated people can still get CoViD because they were afraid it would stop people from getting the jab, so they assumed they were safe and went back to pre-CoViD behavior patterns. The government is reducing the testing regime, so future numbers will be less reliable.
Public TV station ARD/Das Erste started to lose credibility with me when they claimed on Twitter that medical masks don't protect. That is false/"fake news": the truth is they are designed to protect the patient when worn by staff, so their protection is asymmetric and biased against the wearer and in favor of the person talking to the wearer. But they do provide a little protection even for the wearer, as the larger droplets get caught by them, and catching a virus also depends on the amount and concentration of viral material exposed to. (The reason the posted the tweet was because at the time, there was a shortage and they did not want that non-medical staff buy them up so there was enough of a supply for medical staff. It's okay to ask people to stop buying them for that reason but not feeding them with false information to make them stop.)
The new government put a general in place to run a task force and instead of saying "fantastic, why didn't the previous government think of that?" the press questioned why leaders who all declined military service on the grounds of conscience appointed a military man (the candidate seems to be a supply chain expert, so not a bad choice - although I personally would pick a paramedic because pandemic training is part of one's education, at least it was back in the 1990s when I did mine).
Despite all of this, in fairness the situation in Germany is much better than in other countries (I can only say that from personal knowledge about the UK, France and the US), and I would say that at the beginning, the government did a good job in absolute and relative terms.