Edit: Otto von Bismarck actually instituted the health insurance system of Germany, certainly not a socialist!
It's not obvious to me at all you can make a political judgement from covid19.
What makes Washington, Illinois, and Michigan so bad compared to Texas, Virginia or California?
Texas and Virginia had the benefit of getting hit when most people were taking this seriously (i.e. they didn't want to become NYC). You also have to consider public transportation use which is way higher in places like Seattle and Chicago than it is in Dallas, Houston, etc.
So again it's mostly about exposure: density, travelers, being in contact with travelers, being in contact with people who've been in contact with travelers, etc. How quickly shelter in place was ordered (getting a testing system set up would also have worked but you have to act even faster and spend upfront money, which of course we were never going to do) has a direct effect in exposure. And then it's all about how well you get supplies to treat the infected.
2. Maybe they haven't broken 200k tests because there isn't an obvious population to test when you've had an order of magnitude fewer covid deaths?
Germany is capable of doing 123k tests per day currently (https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...)
So, if we were to to scale Texas' to Germany's "3x population", Germany could still handle that in a week. The implication stands.
> 2. Maybe they haven't broken 200k tests because there isn't an obvious population to test when you've had an order of magnitude fewer covid deaths?
No, it's that they're willing to die for Whataburger. There's nothing else that would tangibly explain a complete refusal by the 9th largest economy in the world to attempt to protect itself.
The RKI (German CDC equivalent) developed and distributed a PCR test in mid January, so they were primed.
Marc and his family have donated so much for emergency medicine, the last resort for the uninsured, which is awesome.
What makes me sad is to see how people can end up in an existential crisis, both for their health and financially, because the system is failing them.