Germany to Stop Free Covid-19 Tests in October
reuters.com
reuters.com
Something similar is happening in France: the tests are going to be available but no longer subsidized/covered by the state soon in an effort to encourage people to get vaccinated instead of relying on PCR test after PCR test to prove they haven’t got COVID.
False-negative results exist.
A vaccinated person may only spread if they are indeed infected, which is less common to begin with. Then, if they are indeed infected, the rate of transmission is much lower - as they usually don't develop heavy viral loads.
Um, this is the case also for the unvaccinated.
I keep hearing this but I don't understand where it comes from. IIUC, it doesn't matter that you're as contagious when sick and vaccinated as unvaccinated. When vaccinated you are less likely to contract the disease in the first place and therefore reduce overall transmission.
When tested negative you are even less likely to spread within the context of the flight/concert/etc that both are attending.
If there were a Restaurant C that required only proof of past Covid through antibodies, I'd eat there.
> vaccination does not prevent transmission
statement is a very valid one. I'm vaccinated but I really dislike the decision to cut public funding for the tests.
When unvaxed person takes a test to, for example, take a flight, we know reasonably sure he's not carrying/infecting fellow passengers.
When vaxed person goes on the same flight he/she might well be carrying/infecting fellow passengers, because the vaccine does not stop infections.
First we needed to get vaxed for saving the old and sick by herd immunity. Since vaccines do immunize the herd immunity is no longer discussed. Then we needed to get vaxed for stop the ICU overload. Since the old and sick are vaxed and/or have already been sick, we now have no more overload on the ICU. But we still need measured because some infection metrics need to stay out of the red to allow tourism/trade to pick up.
This is some serious goalpost changing. Why?
I see this exempts children but makes the mistake of tying specific vaccination decisions to the public health benefit of having free testing. It's abusing a public health tool as a cudgel, a pattern I'm seeing in various places.
If this happened in the US, it would just lead to undocumented spreading and delays in care, worsening outcomes.
Im worried with things like this, and similar missteps by the US government, we're heading back to March 2020.
As an adult you currently can get the shot without a waitlist or even an appointment.
I wish everyone would get vaccinated. But they're not, and there's breakthrough cases (this has happened to multiple people I know personally).
I guess I see this in the opposite way as intended: why should an adult who's been vaccinated be punished in trying to get tested, as a side effect of trying to punish someone who hasn't?
This virus is a moving target. The test doesn't just benefit the person tested.
The virus may be a moving target, but all governments have shown that they are willing to fund public safety against infection. If circumstances change, we may have to return to free and widespread testing, but the hope is that vaccination can drive the active infection rate to 0 which is something that all our measures for the past year have been unable to do.
> I guess I see this in the opposite way as intended: why should an adult who's been vaccinated be punished in trying to get tested, as a side effect of trying to punish someone who hasn't?
From my experience vaccinated people don't bother testing them selves - and I can totally relate as a fully vaccinated person.
The risk of spreading the virus as a FFP2 wearing vaccinated human seems to be so low that I personally tend to not care much.
What bothers me is that we as German citizens have the rare opportunity to get vaccinated and get back to a more normal life - but it seems like only ~60% are really interested in getting the shot. Right now we have too much vaccine doses and actually giving them to other countries (at least).
People just not going to their vaccination appointments, or cancelling due to a barber appointment, ..
This saddens me. I somehow thought the idiot ratio is lower. The pandemic was eye opening in that regard.
Suspending tests for free though will mean many testing sites closing down, making it logistically harder for families to do certain things during vacation. But that is dependent on whether or not tests are required.
Yes, it will continue and they are also required to wear masks all the time. Where I live school has started again and nothing has changed. The treatment of school children during the pandemic in Germany is a disgrace.
Why? This seems pretty safe compared to other countries.
similar problem here in Denmark, in my case since my child is autistic it is difficult to test or vaccinate him.
Furthermore since I can have the disease despite being vaccinated I would like to get tested when it makes sense to do so.
on edit: the problem I mean is the higher level one of 'are subject to testing requirements if they become ill'.
Singapore (where I live) is shifting from going after 0 cases to measuring vaccination rates as the headline number sometime in Q4.
Sadly, it will take lives those who defy vaccination and those who are innocently cannot take it, but as is, the world will reopen so changing how we measure happens accordingly.
At least now, with working from home, idiots would not come over to my desk to cough all over me with their plague only because they felt pressure to be present.
The vaccine is also paid with taxpayer money and it is a personal decision to get vaccinated. The STIKO does not currently recommend the vaccine for pregnant or breastfeeding mothers.
This reads like nothing but an attempt to put pressure on certain hesitant groups or maybe covering for the fact that the vaccines don't seem to be as effective as initially advertised to the laymen when it comes to the reduction of contagion risk.
Also there are long-existing rules for required vaccinations for children or if you plan to travel abroad. Nobody talks about that.
This whole discussion is just some right-wing talking shit, stirring up uninformed people.
To add something (more) useful:
The vaccination will with very high chance prevent you from getting a serious case and therefore saving/keeping free resources in hospitals and immense costs for emergency care or prevent you from dying.
Hundreds of millions of people are vaccinated around the earth. There's not a significant amount of people that have died because of the vaccination or did even have any serious complications. Most of the "complications" or just what you would expect if your body is having an immune reaction: I myself had cold-like symptoms for two days. That's all and that's to be expected.
There are very likely no negative "long-term effects" of the vaccination. How should that even work? Vaccination is building anti-bodies to fight a disease, how can there even be any long-term effect?
With delta, you will not reach anything close to herd immunity unless you vaccine about >=90% of the population. There is limited data on the relative safety of these new vaccines on <12 year olds.
That's one example of existing mandatory vaccinations and it's for the greater good of everybody. Nobody cares about that.
I think the parent's suggestion to "just force people to get it" is incredibly simplistic and unfeasible considering the current laws and structure of government.
There's also going to be diminishing returns on vaccinating the last few percent of the population. At some point, the vaccinated outnumber the unvaccinated so much that the large majority of cases, hospitalisations, deaths, and spreading of the virus is happening amongst the vaccinated. Then there's all the people who aren't eligible for vaccination at all, of course...
I say Science is with us, let's vaccinate children and force people with cancer to get the Shot before we continue their treatment...
/s
It's been 20 years since the last time any official media and mainstream political party used logic to analyze anything.
Did anyone see that the average life expectancy of the 10% additional boomer population is coming to an end?
Wouldn't that give us at least 10% more mortality?
In France we are refusing entry to hospitals for people with frickin cancer, even though we are supposed to vaccinate to protect people who cannot (or at least that was the "Science" up until now).
We left logic and science at the door.
And these groups will continue to be able to get tested for free.
I fear that in practice, this will divide the pro-vax and anti-vax camps even further. Pressuring, insulting and deriding unvaccinated people will make them even less likely to get the vaccine.
A lack of recommendation does not mean that doctors could not vaccinate people anyways. The STIKO has not recommended vaccination of all youths yet (12-17 year old) but only for those at risk for example. Since the vaccines are already approved for that range of age though, some federate states have greenlit doing it in their vaccination centers anyways.
This also sends the wrong message: That a vaccinated person has a substantial degree of immunity enough and cannot spread the virus, thus being allowed to enter public places without a test. We know this isn't the case.
They don't expressly reccomend it, true, but that's because of lack of data, not because they have any reason to think it may cause problems. They say only that each person has to balance the risk of possible of unknown side effects of the vaccine against the consequences of a full-blown Covid infection during preganancy.
Pregnant Women can still have the vaccine if they wish. I asked a few doctors about this, and all said they would have no qualms about doing it.
I don't expect most of the emergency responses to actually end, that may never happen. But there is no emergency any more. It has emerged, been dealt with, and the world is now about to be in a Business as Usual state.
Was get most of the worlds governments to cooperate with you, including the ones least willing to do so. Make people capable of detecting the seemingly invisible enemy either complicit, get rid of them or make chose your invisible enemy in a way so they will always make false detections!
Either make most hospital staff complicit, or simulate lots of sick people in some way (some of which will have to die to make it convincing). You can turn up the statistical death number without problem, but the local properties need to be either semi consistent or the people need to be complicit. You should also do something to get people to have symptoms (like loss of smell) which are not that common so far.
Lastly, the payoff for all of this simple setup is unclear. You can pass a law to restrict free Covid-19 testing? You can add another vaccine to the mandatory vaccines?
I mean, I am sure there are some states that have extremly overbearing consequences law wise. But in the context of Germany? It is completely unclear to me why many governments should participate in this.
Well, simulating lots of sick people is very trivial, ever since the idea of asymptomatic disease came into play. Feel completely healthy? Better get tested! You could have entire populations being completely healthy, but the tests could still report diseases and you'd have an asymptomatic pandemic going on.
Then they messed that up quite well here. And that doesn't seem all that great a payoff at all. And way easier and more reliably achieved by getting position data from smart phone OS vendors. There is zero cost benefit analysis in the world that would make this pandemic a useful strategy to get easily falsifiable, hardly enforecable, coarse location data on the population.
> Well, simulating lots of sick people is very trivial, ever since the idea of asymptomatic disease came into play. Feel completely healthy? Better get tested! You could have entire populations being completely healthy, but the tests could still report diseases and you'd have an asymptomatic pandemic going on.
I was talking about sick people in hospitals (hence the mention of hospital staff being complicit or the need of people simulating being sick and possibly dying). That might not have been very clear of me.
I can't figure out why this is talked about so rarely, maybe someone can explain it to me. My best guess is that it's similar "logic" to the lies about wearing masks in the first few months of last year, but even then I don't see the need.
"The draft stipulates that people who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons like expectant women and children under 18 will continue to be entitled to subsidised tests."
> Exceptions are planned for people who - for health reasons, for example - cannot be vaccinated or for whom there is no general vaccination recommendation (especially pregnant women and children and adolescents under 18).
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/corona-ungeimpfte...
"...and in August Napoleon announced that there would be work on Sunday afternoons as well. This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half."
https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/children/tex...
Because they make an extremly heavy handed comparisson without making any point.
> The government would do a better job to make it freely available to all
Many did that, including Germany, and they still have the same problem. In the context of this article, the freely available vaccine is the starting point to limit free testing for everyone that could have gotten the vaccine.