Special Report: Pandemic WAAAY East of the Border
Today's post is by Senior Europe Correspondent Maria Iovine
In Germany there’s an expression—Wer viel misst, misst viel Mist—if you measure a lot, you measure a lot of crap (Mist). That’s something like the German version of "figures lie and liars figure."
We have been awash in a giant sea of pandemic data for longer than ever expected. News, stats, charts, graphs, you name it. It’s exhausting, even if you love numbers.
New types of stats emerge almost daily. The latest is the number of vaccinations administered…or is that produced? Or delivered but not yet administered? Shots in arms. It sounds like the new boots on the ground. But I digress.
As a US expat living in Europe, I have the double whammy of comparing the EU to the US, or Germany’s population to California’s. Trying to get to some useful vaccination numbers, I compare my German state, Baden-Württemberg, to Colorado, Virginia, or Arizona—wherever seems like home. Then there’s county level and metropolitan centers statistics. It’s a part time job keeping up with all this Mist.
I'm living in Germany with a German who enjoys nothing more than direct debate (I’m sure we’ll debate that claim once this goes to print). I found myself listening to his detailed comparison of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Germany to that in the US.
He was responding to my comment that Germany really wasn’t doing all that well, as reported 13 February in the German news outlet Deutsche Welle. There, Chancellor Angela Merkel voiced disappointment with only 3.8 million shots-in-arms.
I had quickly flipped to my favorite U.S. source to put it in context. California, roughly half the population of Germany, had racked up about 6.8 million doses. “Wow! Huge difference,” I told him. “Well, it depends on how you measure,” he said. (Here we go.)
Is it single doses? Numbers of patients? First shots? Second shots? Ok, fair enough. It was a reminder to check the ways the measurers measure the “stuff.” Still, I was surprised. I’d adopted more than a bit of German pride in my many years there.
Who’s “winning” the inoculation race? In Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World, the answers are pretty clear, and even sometimes surprising. Israel in first place. Japan near the bottom. U.S. in fourth, and Germany in…30th? For detailed information on vaccinations in Germany, look here.
It starts to feel a little bit like an Olympic event where they won't be playing Deutschlandlied or the Star Spangled Banner at the podium. Before the pandemic kick-off, I had lived with the idea of Germany as the model nation, so its vaccination position was difficult to square.
After all the numbers are crunched and the Mist has been measured, it is my humble opinion that for each shot in each arm, it’s a win for all humans. Get thee to an inoculation center—whether an NFL or fussball stadium—and watch the vaccination numbers go up while the infection numbers go down.
For our next international, intercultural,
bi-lingual debate: How long has Germany been in lockdown? Well, that depends
on…who
is measuring!
