do you want. someone to remind you we're all in the studio we wish you happy holidays merry christmas from all a very merry christmas eve merry christmas and stacy happy holidays everyone in all honesty you're going to see everybody's in way in speeches. no big family celebrations no fireworks in many countries this year people have to for goby love the traditions because the pandemic is spiraling out of control here in germany that means lock down until january 10th at the earliest non-essential shops are closed christmas markets have gone dark nightly curfews and alcohol bans apply in places and schools are shut the u.s. canada and the united kingdom have become vaccinating but they're vulnerable citizens still face grave risk yet things could be different countries like ireland

imposed tough lockdowns much earlier and are now reaping the benefits are title coated 19 crisis who pays when the politicians get it wrong. not a. hello and welcome to to the point and it's a pleasure to greet our guests matthew condit chick is the chief europe correspondent for politico and he says germany's covert 19 policy is economically exactly what the doctor ordered the new lock down in the quiet season couldn't have been better and it's a pleasure to welcome you fisher she is a violin based journalist and physician who reports on science and medicine for radio broadcasters and turf pinion this year beloved traditions can have a life. threatening consequences everyone who does not attend big get togethers

saves lives. and it's great to have derek scully on the program again he is a correspondent based here in berlin with the irish times and he says ireland did it right in the 2nd wave after a 6 week lock down the irish are looking forward to a relatively relaxed christmas and new year. so matthew let me start out by coming back to the quiet season because it's certainly not a quiet season for medical personnel and for many people it working in clinics and of course intensive care units more and more are under strain here in germany what happened. well i think the government took overall a fairly flexible approach over the last several months in germany because they didn't want to have a hard lockdown like we've seen in other countries in europe in france and belgium

italy and so forth one reason is because the effects that that has on the economy and yes now the numbers are rising in germany but if you look back over the past 6 months and if you look at how the german economy has performed and it's outperformed most of europe it's done surprisingly well with for example in the 3rd quarter alone the g.d.p. rising by over 8 percent which surprised everybody i think you have to look at the entire picture here and say you know yes they could have done a full lockdown and we would be in a better place right now at christmas then we would have otherwise but there are also other effects of a lockdown that people i think often forget particularly on mental health and you know on schools and so forth so i think that overall germany should get a pretty good grade here thank you very much we will come back to the economic side in just a minute but you say beloved traditions can have life threatening consequences so

clearly you think that the situation here is pretty dire yes and i think red not a valium is important to. the contacts that we're having because that is the one thing the virus really attacks unfortunately is the one thing that we really really want to be together with our people but this this time we really just have to make sure not to see anybody who is not within our. bubble unless we can be for something but really have to watch out this year so actually there are some restrictions or before these tighter rules there were some restrictions that had been put in place in mid november a so-called lock down light that was supposed to be a circuit breaker to really break through that chain of infections but it has. it turned out that way why not it hasn't worked as the politicians had hoped because i think. they hoped that the people in germany would act accordingly to those fools more strictly we know that in march people reduce their mobility by

60 percent and they only reduce them to 40 percent this time and that is just not enough so we saw that different than in ireland for example people didn't work in the home office enough they did travel with public transport a lot and things like that so. in the hole that was not able to really be jews the number hopes in the beginning do you know you pointed out that ireland did handle the 2nd wave differently so 2 questions about that 1st one how stable is the current situation there i was checking some news reports it looks like it's not quite clear if the infection rate may be trending upward again exactly i mean i look at these lockdowns it's a bit like cortisone cream you can put it on the rash the rush will go away the questions i quickly will the rash come back up and have you talk of the underlying cause so these lockdowns are only ever measures but it's almost like when do we need the breathing space when we need the breathing space and time it accordingly

and i mean christmas is extremely important millions of immigrants like to come home many of them won't make it but for these people in our then they've had a very tough year they didn't have the breathing space in the summer the way we had in germany so to not give them the christmas there would have been a revolt so i think they just counted backwards from christmas 6 weeks and they said let's do it but as you said this morning the chief medical officer anon is worried things are creeping up again but i mean the numbers comparable number is there at $48.00 cases per 100000 over 7 days so in parts of saxony in eastern germany there it's $700.00 or so and in germany it's a golden $670.00 so we're still a long way but you know it's going to creep up and people are already saying is the price of our christmas we're going to be locked down in january but people would say if i had a choice i think january everyone's mikes or their credit cards anyway sitting at home in general is what they do best so maybe it will be less painful then so yeah a lot of governments are just making plans but i did see what our than they had a counter in front of them the counter backwards and in germany they just seem to

like over christmas forgot about it and now we're sort of facing into this and for retailers for families to be told that 2 days notice oh by the way christmas shopping is counseled i mean the panic having people panicking running into shops grabbing whatever they could in the middle of a pandemic really doesn't seem very smart and they knew christmas was coming. if you compare say the. way that germany handled the 1st wave to how it's handling the 2nd one do you see a change in the way that politicians have behaved here in this country i would say i see more of a difference in the way the population has behaved because people seem to be much less worried about corona now then they were in march because they didn't have the visibility when something happens for the 2nd time you tend to be lest worried about it if you've survived the 1st stage and i think that's what happened here where most people understand that you know even if they get it their chances of

dying are not that high and you know they know what they need to do to avoid getting it back in march the whole situation with the mask for example wasn't really clear if that was good or not there was just a lot of confusion about it so i think you know people tend to blame the politicians but i think that we all know now when we knew back in march that there was going to be a 2nd wave there's always a 2nd wave there was with the spanish influenza in 1918 and there is now do you think that's right uli or would you say actually politicians do bear part of the responsibility certainly there was some criticism about mixed signals that have been sent here in germany say when rates started trending upward again in early october and i think that has to that was definitely a problem i mean it's i think also it's very true that people are getting used to the virus and that because there's still a lot of people who don't know anybody who really got very sick from the virus or anything i think that that helps people or makes people underestimate the danger of

the virus much more than it was in spring and i think that's a big problem but i also think it will be the duty of the politicians to communicate in a better and clearer way that the danger is still there and that we have that we have to act together to do something against the spend them a can i. sometimes in some parts of the country that trend wrong derek whether or not ireland is the perfect example certainly some countries do apparently do better than others new zealand taiwan some other places in asia to what extent do you think that the approaches in such countries are transferable to others are there recipes here in terms of political guidance communication and so on no i think the social element is crucial i mean and it's also what works at one point you know the german approach they had the they were able to test quickly they had

the capacity early on tracking in tracing the they were also decentralized so they could act locally and this particular phase that the center provides approach that appears to work less i think a crucial issue is how much can the state expect of its people and i don't know much about 8 of the people have said there's a higher level of compliance with you know an order comes and people are more willing and western europe is more notion of personal freedom you know your infringer my person for you know i've been i'm entitled to celebrate christmas as i wish in arlon what i find interesting life and fascinating was the level of social control is so much higher there than here in germany. meaning people could be shamed into doing things more quickly i mean shame was taken out it was like an instinctive irish catholic holdover i don't know what but if you could be shamed into staying at home or you're going abroad it was never legal to go abroad but if you were going abroad you would hear about it from your neighbors offered so again that's not sustainable but it's certainly in the 1st stages it works and there's sort of a social social cohesion i notice in germany things seem to be at least in berlin

which is not germany but a much more individualistic approach you know there's a notion of society but the people aren't as close to each other so the consequences of your personal decisions crops are not as immediately apparent to you or you care less about the people in the urban immediate environment could be affected by your personal choices let's drill a little bit deeper on the economic. side of the pandemic the difficult tradeoff that we face is of course not only about forgoing beloved traditions but also very much about material costs germany's new lockdown will have severe consequences for retailers in particular let's go to new and bag known for a christmas market whose magic has now abruptly come to an end. called an angel's malt wine shopping the epitome of german christmas especially at the world famous closed candles marked in on bag this year it's cancelled only a few stones are open selling fruit and vegetables to the handful of customers you

know america in your mind there is no christmas here there are no tourists anymore it's just plain bad at the mark as you can see the market is completely quiet. people should only leave their homes in urgent cases alcohol is banned in public places and there is no nighttime curfew all enforced by the police in germany hesitated to impose a hard lock down for a long time and it was preceded by an unusually emotional appeal from the chancellor even was on that if you had too much contact over christmas and it turns out to be the last one with our grandparents we would have failed and that is something we should not to when. in fact according to surveys around 70 percent of germans are in favor of a hard lock down but how long can people hold out. and let me ask matthew carney exactly that question because your opening statement

indicates that you think the germans are in a good position to bear the costs but the retailers association here in germany says that as many as one in 2 retailers could wind up facing bankruptcy if they don't get enough help quickly well fortunately germany isn't primarily a retail economy and i think people often forget this because you know when you go out on the street what you see are shops and when shops are suffering that's something that's more immediate to most people but it is and has always been an industrial economy it lives from exports and that has continued german exports to china and elsewhere in asia are back up again recently so i think this is what the government has really focused on and that's why i think that being more flexible over. the past several months has been a good idea because this is a crucial phase for most industrial companies the end of the year particular the 4th quarter and so while retailers are hurting i mean the lockdown started on

december the 16th so they're going to lose maybe a week or so of their normal business which is also a crucial time of year for them but overall i think the trade off is probably worth it because if you had started to lock down earlier closing schools for example that would have had a much more severe impact on the core of the german economy derek the german government says that it will help affected businesses cover their fixed costs to the tune of another 11000000000 euros a month apparently from the public purse the finance minister says that's ok germany can afford this astronomically high debt do you think that's right. the finance minister in germany the federal finance minister is a social democrat and coincidentally he wants to be elected transfer next year so i mean i think it's everyone wants to be the christmas from wants to be santa clause at the moment but he often friends who aren't in politics aren't in finance they just said where is his money coming from so if them on the street is beginning to

wonder where the money is coming from rather than saying isn't it great or giving free money it's it's working for me and under me i suppose a kind afforded more than other countries because for the last couple of years it was almost like a religion here they call it the shots and know the bones but they're one of the black 0 of the books to be bonds but suddenly in the in the crisis they've been able to because their balance sheets were more balanced over the years is able to take money but even by turn standards this is a phenomenal amounts of money out of the certainly interesting what they can promise next year running up to the election the federal elections in september if they've actually blown all the money now you're. looking at this tradeoff between economic burdens and the burdens on health systems because of the pandemic do you see. there really are alternative approaches i'm thinking about countries like sweden or switzerland which try to hard to let normal life go on and to sensually that way preserve the openness of the economy those models essentially

have failed haven't done the work i mean we saw that the swedish have. many more deaths than we did and that the economy didn't live better and in germany so i think it's always it's always very difficult to balance these 2 options but. scientists know that if you have a heart locked down and you keep it short but strict normally it is good for the numbers and it doesn't hurt the economy as bad as if you if you keep a low mass measures are light measures for a long time so i think doing our lock down now and hoping that it can be short it's better than yes keeping it going on the on the fairly high number there is one model here in germany that is sometimes seen as an alternative to the way that most states are doing things and it's coming from the fairly small southwestern town of

tubingen where the authorities green party politicians have made a very big effort to protect the elderly in the wrong durable for example by creating special times where only they can shop and mean while allowing life otherwise to go on pretty much as normal would you say that is a model that could work elsewhere at least in germany it is a nice model to really try to protect the elderly more but it's never going to prevent the virus from getting to the to the vista groups because people mingle and you always have young people working at hospitals or the social care homes and stuff like that so you are. is a nice try and i'm sure it has a good effect but it's not. stop it's not government kind of stuff that i'm nomic of the virus is spreading also into the other groups matthew in many ways this discussion in caps elite's what we saw in the united states essentially in the

tensions between donald trump who said just let the economy do its thing and the pandemic will kind of eventually fizzle out to a joe biden who says the economy is never going to really get back on its feet until we get the pandemic under control which side would you come down on well i think the economy is going to start prospering again in the coming months as the vaccination starts to roll out we're seeing that already i think we're seeing more optimism in the united states because of that that's also reflected in the stock market which is sort of a harbinger of sentiment going forward you know trump didn't manage the crisis well it's clear if you look at the number of people who died in the united states or 300000 now dead and 3000 dying every day as we speak now so i don't think that was a success that said the economy has performed better than in many other countries because there wasn't a harsh lockdown and you know this i think is

a situation that is different in every country you have to listen to the people there different mentalities around the world obviously china was very successful in combating the virus they have methods i think that most people in europe would would not accept but they did succeed in bringing the pandemic under control very quickly so i think you just have to be somewhat flexible starting with massive surveillance and use of private data i want to come to the vaccine question just a moment but there is one more. political aspect and that is popular support for the measures we saw in the report and i've seen this myself i was out on the streets yesterday talking to people 7080 percent of germans saying they support this new lockdown they think tighter restrictions are. important should have maybe been put in place sooner. merkel has seen her popularity skyrocket yet again since she's been calling for these harder measures but the fact is that is now what is it likely to look like in 6 months or longer if people are losing their

jobs if retailers are failing could we see a backlash in which people lose faith in the politicians and perhaps turn to populism i think it's very likely i mean i find it interesting that there were enough people out on the streets yesterday to do a vox pop i mean technically we're not supposed to be i came here through the western city center and i was expecting another sort of zombie film scenario like in march where it was a bun in the streets and a bit of rubbish blowing in the wind people read about and if you're awesome if one has a good reason to be out the question is all yeah well of course there are strikes and so i think what we're seeing is this sort of cognitive dissonance in people's minds of course i know this restrictions but i just need to let the person parks in the 2nd lane i just need to i just need to get my bread rolls i just need to go to the bank machine so i think that exceptionalism we all of this exceptionalism in our mind and i think that's growing in in march february or march april people were

just say no i mean there's no exceptions we just have to ditch it so we're already now in quite an elastic phase in our brains and that could go on and i i don't think the populism i think that's more interesting in the americans party the christian democrats they if they're looking for a new leader i'm going to be interesting who wins there and will be a more authoritarian figure with the more a we need to like america figure we need to keep everyone together and to gratian this figure so i think that will be he will see that in the middle of january and i think that will be an interesting barometer of where in german public opinion is this is the largest party this person who's going to be elect is probably going to be the next chancellor and they will set the tone i think for the debate. let us now take a quick look at pandemic politics some countries that have largely failed to get the pandemic under control such as the u.s. and britain are now hoping that vaccination will put things right the united kingdom was the 1st country in europe to approve biotech pfizer's vaccine and it is accelerating its rollout margaret keenan

a 90 year old woman from coventry made history as the 1st to be vaccinated she's happy to have put code behind her and hopes that many will follow her example her shot kicked off the largest mass vaccination in british history elderly anderson home staff are 1st in line for the vaccinations yuliya based on that british example do you think that authorities here could and should have accelerated the approval process and rolled the vaccine out faster i don't think so because i think it's really important to make the people see that this is. a process that's really following protocol and that all the standards that need to be applied are applied and that the people can really trust if if it's approved as a vaccine they can trust that it's good and for that reason i think it's ok that it's taking a while and derek how fast would you expect to britain's program to show results do

you think a quick rollout can begin to compensate for those failures that were in fact made by johnson's government i think he actually what we're seeing with the vaccine rolled out is across infection bragg's realities it's a disastrous situation things are going to talk they need to some political they need to the good news story so i would be very surprised if there weren't some phone calls made to say we actually need the vaccine and we need it now and the health minister went on british television and was crying crocodile tears are moving it was to see this so i think there's a political reality to to be anough course there is a political reality of the deaths and. i've been asking my british cousins live why is nobody talking at the desk right here i mean this is like grand fellow and hillsborough and all of the terrible disaster in britain on a daily basis and he's not so you know he's on political under political pressure to deliver but in the long term it would be terrible if if for some reason this emergency. allowing the vaccine to come to an art emergency rules it's not

backfires on public credibility as the credibility of the vaccine is undermined will he take the political responsibility for that knowing bars johnson i'd say probably not. you politicians here are warning that it's going to take a while for vaccines to truly bring the infection rates down germany's health minister says we might see a return to normalcy in summer do you think that's right is it realistic. certainly realistic it might not be realistic to think that everything is going to open up again on january 10th which is now the official end of the lockdown that might need to be extended but i think by the time summer comes around again i expect things will have calmed down by then hopefully the vaccine will have been rolled out to many people not everybody who's going to need it but we'll be on the right path and i think the world will look much different and. just because we're almost at the end of our show let me come back to our title we asked whether citizens must pay

for politicians errors we have a larn hard winter before us before that vaccine really does begin to show results what would you want to see from politicians here in germany but also in europe as a whole in terms of trying to keep people on track to keep the pandemic at least somewhat under control and i really think it needs a year of wyatt and really kinnear strategy we need to really formulate a goal that everybody's working to torrance and then we need clear coming occasions by the politicians and we need the people to follow the rules and really act accordingly. last sentence what would you want to see from leaders from european union solution that's what europe is here for it doesn't the virus doesn't care whether it's in belgium or across the border an hour away in cologne and that we're doing in the national level and that's catastrophic in the long term thank you very much to all of you for being with us thanks to you out there for tuning in see you

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play . this is d.w. news of live from berlin germany reveals its plans for vaccinating millions of people against a covert 90 box with a limited number of doses available the country's health minister says people will have to be patient also on the program hundreds of schoolboys kidnapped in nigeria are of united with their families their abduction has led to public anger and demands for better protection.