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Comment by FiberBundle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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