Heroes to zeros: how German perfectionism wrecked its Covid vaccine drive | Hacker News Reader

Heroes to zeros: how German perfectionism wrecked its Covid vaccine drive

theguardian.com

7 pointsAloha8 comments

The phrase "German perfectionism" seems inappropriate in a forum like HN. Assigning behaviorial traits to a national group is a slippery slope.

That's how a German friend of mine living in Germany referred to it. He called it "german love of precision".

There, I'm an American, I value liberty at the cost of things being lightly organized chaos, Germans value precision, the Brits seem to value queuing up for things (I tease). Our national zeitgeist does become reflected back into our culture.

On the other hand, the US is ahead of all other countries in the vaccine rollout, but the mainstream media isn't covering it, rather focusing all people's attention on the outrage and negative news.

US has 50 Million fully vaccinated and 140 Million doses given. For comparison, Canada has only 0.6 Million fully vaccinated and 1.7 Million given at least one dose.

The US is doing quite well, but when you measure per capita it is not #1. Per capita, US is #9 in doses given, #6 in people vaccinated, and #6 in people fully vaccinated. Israel is #1.

There's a worldwide tracker here [1] that is good for comparing countries.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...

Population density and politics probably plays a bigger deal than capita as a metric though.

It's not fair to compare the US with countries having less than 10 million population. The ranking in this tracker is misleading absent the population figures.

I mean... I've been getting this news. I'm not sure what you're referring to.

>the mainstream media isn't covering it

Except for all of the mainstream media coverage such as this article in the Guardian, which credits the US vaccination program in contrast to Germany.

The article says:

"90 days since the first jab was administered, only 10% of Germany’s population have received their first dose, compared with 42% in the UK and 26% in the US."

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