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Comment by amalik14 | Hacker News Reader

I live in germany. German has not tested extensively or even early. In Germany, I have been trying to buy a mask since 3 weeks and you cant even buy it because its sold out.

Germany has acted like a fail state here.

I am suprised how germany has managed to keep such a low death rate because Merkels response to COVID has been worst than developing (so called 3rd world) countries.

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What are you talking about? Ever since the first big Munich cohort, Germany has done extensive testing and scientists like Dr. Drosten have confirmed multiple times that we've been testing from a very early point on and are probably closer to the number of actual infections than many of our neighboring countries.

Mask shortage is a global problem and will remain so for some time since we'll have to limit making them available to where they are actually needed (hospitals, doctors, nursing homes).

All in all, I think Germany has dealt with SARS-CoV-2 in a responsible way, and the numbers so far seem to agree.

Objectively speaking from outside Germany, Germany's response has been far better than that of other large EU countries (UK, France, Spain, Italy). Germany has done contact tracing and testing, Germany has done (and is doing) 3-10x as many tests per capita per day than most other countries, Germany has been rigorously enforcing quarantines as opposed to say the UK, which has not enforced them at all.

Yes, no mandatory masks, no temperature measurements of key workers -- it is still far worse than Korea or Taiwan -- but don't kid yourself, Merkel and her advisors have been far more competent here than Johnson, Macron let alone US authorities.

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