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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

What are the major root causes for the surge in Germany? Low humidity/temperature? New variants? Something else?

IIRC last winter in the US at least, health officials and the media were quick to blame irresponsible citizens and social gatherings – but the major root cause seemed to be a new, more transmissible (delta) variant.

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Delta emerged in late spring 2021 though. You must be thinking about Alpha. However, it became dominant in the US only in late March 2021 according to Wikipedia[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Alpha_variant#Sprea...

> You must be thinking about Alpha

Yes, unfortunately I couldn't correct it. I wish HN allowed corrections for weeks rather than hours!

Hmm, as I understood it alpha was circulating in the US in December, but perhaps you are correct that it didn't actually surge until later?

Another factor is that the German government tried to keep infection rates low at all times, leading to very little natural immunity in the population compared to other countries.

We have 57 million fully vaccinated [0] people and 6 million infected/recovered [1] out of 83 million inhabitants. The recovered even have to get a shot later to keep their status as recovered/vaccinated (which exempts from the restrictions that are imposed now), so they might even be considered as a subset of the vaccinated group. More infections therefore would not have increased the total number of immune people but only cost more lives.

Beside that we can vaccinate a multiple of the number of newly infected people per day just fine. It's been about people being unwilling to get the shot, not availability of vaccines for quite a while now. Example: one day of vaccinations like yesterday (~1 Mio) [0] equals two weeks of new infections at levels like today (>73000).

[0] https://impfdashboard.de/

[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/478220a4c454480e823...

I disagree, over the summer they aimed for low infection rates, explicitly coupling openings to certain infection rate thresholds, knowing full well at that time that the virus was going to be endemic and without any good reason at all believing that sufficiently many people would be vaccinated in order to contain the pandemic in the winter. Other countries such as France or the Britain simply didn't care about high infection rates over the summer and face a smaller wave this winter.

This is not logical. More infections in the younger age groups would have boosted the defense systems of many while keeping lethalities low. This would have helped tremendously.

Would love to know the effect if any of being surrounded by countries with lower vaccination rates. Germany may have 70% vaccinated but how much does it help them when Poland has only 50%? Is there enough mobility between Poland and Germany to make it matter?

Of concern to a Californian who is surrounded by other states with lower vaccination rates. Even internally in California there is a steep gradient between the coastal counties with 80-90% and the inland counties as low as 50%.

Major cause of the surge is that temperature have gotten too low for outdoor meetings/dining and keeping windows open. Same as last year.

Probably cold weather, Delta, and people getting lazy about their precautions, after 18 or so months of pandemic.

Yes, Delta combined with cooler weather and high percentage of antivaxxers.

Antivaxxers, but also unvaccinated children. In the current Covid wave in Austria children 5-14 years old have the highest 7-day incidence.

School children in Austria are tested three times a week, so the numbers can't be compared to other age groups.

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