Angela Merkel's COVID-19 Plan: What Travelers Should Know About Coronavirus In Germany

"We're playing for time," German chancellor Angela Merkel said bluntly of the German government strategy at her March 11 press conference on Covid-19, just a few hours before World Health Organization chair Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus officially categorized the viral outbreak as a pandemic. It was her very first press conference on the subject, a time lapse of some two weeks as the infections spiked in Germany, a delay for which she has been criticized for of late within the higher economic echelon of the country. But she has been dutifully working on a program, and she had a few warnings for the polity. Put in American football defensive strategy, Chancellor Merkel means to have the German medical establishment and the federal states to run the clock down, stymieing the virus so that it cannot score infections as it runs its course.

That requires some serious social engineering and a massive change in behavior, as the Italians, now a few days into their drastic country-wide lockdown, know too well. In Germany, for the moment, Chancellor Merkel has a lighter, more tactical version of that being put into place.

It will be crucial for travelers in Germany during these past few and next few weeks to know the context of the virus' spread in Germany and the points of official information. General information (in English) on the German government response to the virus from the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit, the Federal Health Ministry, can be found here. From the Robert Koch Insitut, federal Germany's equivalent to the American Centers For Disease Control, here are the official statistics on the number of cases as spread across Germany's 17 states, along with the death statistics. In Berlin, there's an information hotline under this number belonging to the municipal Health Department Administration: 49 (0) 30 90 28 28 28.

Thus far, Chancellor Merkel's changes are: Nationally, Germany has banned gatherings of more than 1000, as pretty much everywhere. This includes Bundesliga soccer matches, of course, and in Berlin, the larger concert venues such as the Opera, the Philharmonic, the Light Opera and such like, where audiences of more than 500 are routinely expected.

In contrast to their neighbors, German schools and universities remain, for the moment, open. As the country's case numbers rise and with that, the risk to the young as spreaders of the virus, look for this to change. Berlin's relatively low number of cases on during Chancellor Merkel's press conference on March 11 was 83. In the following 24 hours that number ticked up an alarming 38 cases to 121. Ominously, that's a 40% spike overnight.

Virtually all of the Covid-19 cases in Germany have been officially registered since the 28-29 February, which is to say, it came relatively late, and it has been a steep two-week spike in the cases of infection expressing themselves enough to be diagnosed. The dates coincide fairly precisely with the returnees from the winter ski-break, during which many families head for France, and worse, Italy. As we know, one of England's most notorious "super-spreaders" infected pretty much everybody he met, including his own family, at a ski chalet in France.

One crucial bit of lifestyle proof that people are taking it seriously - in Berlin, anyway - is that the legendary Friedrichshain nightclub Berghain is shuttering all large parties. That's bad news for Berlin's night owls, not to mention for the tsunami of youth tourism, meaning, the hundreds of thousands of young millennials who flock to Berlin to thrash around in Europe's edgiest Party-Central. Kreuzberg's infamous "Karneval der Kulturen," the Carnival of Cultures, which last year drew a million people to the venerable hipster neighborhood, has been cancelled.

Chancellor Merkel's is not an unintelligent response to the coronavirus threat, although, like other European leaders, she has been accused of foot-dragging in the last weeks. What she and her health minister Jens Spahn are trying to do is to find the balance between necessary care - for the ill and the vulnerable yet-to-be-diagnosed - while at the same time trying not to deplete precious health-care resources or overload hospitals and crucial health-care professionals. Again, Italy's severely strained health-care infrastructure is the nightmare poster child that every other European country is trying not to emulate.

But Germany's famously plain-spoken chancellor is nothing if not a practitioner of old-school Cold War realpolitik, so she also took the time to point out at her press conference that sixty to seventy per cent of Germany's population could - worst case, if things reel out of control - become infected. Although Germany's officially reported case count is relatively low - 2369 on March 12, according to the Robert Koch Insitut - in the context of the press conference, Chancellor Merkel was firing a stark warning shot that the posture of the fight against the virus in Germany would have to change.

We now know that the march of Covid-19 through populations does not occur at a uniform velocity, that the virus is not monolithic and that its percentages of morbidity are not in lockstep. In Europe, the clearest, hottest picture of this that we have is in Italy, whose death toll from the pandemic rose on March 11 by 31% to 837, the highest death-toll spike within 24 hours on the Continent. Italy already had a Europe-high total 10000-plus infections as of March 11, followed by Spain, with 2227 cases and 55 deaths, and France, with 2281 and 48 deaths.

Germany's role in the Continent's vast patchwork battleground is that of a country in which the counts are lower, the spread is slower, and the morbidity - with just six deaths at this writing among the official 2369 reported cases - is at a mere fraction of that in Italy, Spain, and France. Germany is considered one place in which the virus can be slowed - if the public can be convinced to agree to take the necessary, decisive steps to retard its spread, which was Chancellor Merkel's salient point.

Importantly, the tight geography of Europe and its open national borders have come into play in the virus' insidious spread. That is precisely mirrored in the distribution of Germany's March 12 case count of 2369, the vast predominance of which have been concentrated in just three federal states: North Rhine Westfalia with 688, Bavaria with 500, and Baden Württemberg with 454, for a shared total of 1642, or 69% per cent of Germany's total infections. As of March 12, all of Germany's officially-recorded Covid-19 deaths have occurred in these three states.

The geography of Europe comes into play in the German fight against Covid-19 in the following way: Baden Württemberg, one of the three "hottest" federal states, is the country's southwesternmost state, sharing a long border with northeastern France, which is, unfortunately for the Germans, one of France's coronavirus hotspots.

And, unfortunately for all tourists from every country in Alpine Germany, of which there are many at this time of year, the state of Bavaria is Baden Württemberg's neighbor immediately to the east, and carries the second-highest number of Covid-19 cases in the country. Slightly to the north and west, the state with the highest number of cases on March 12 is North Rhine Westfalia - the classic Rhineland of western Germany, a tourist and wine mecca encompassing Bonn, the cathedral city of Cologne, and Düsseldorf. North Rhine Wesfalia borders Belgium and the Netherlands.

In general, then, Covid-19 is concentrated in the southern and western parts of Germany, in other words, the closest parts of the country to France, Belgium, Austria and Italy. In the far less-affected northeastern quadrant of the country, bordering Poland and the Baltic, Berlin, by contrast, has an officially reported count of 121 cases with zero fatalities. Despite its spike in diagnoses from March 11 to March 12.

Travelers in Germany will want to think about these statistics in simple geographical terms - and with all due caution noting that the situation can change instantly, or over a matter of hours. It - the number of Covid-19 cases, fades remarkably as one moves north and east, toward Berlin and the Baltic state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern, aka Pomerania, whose capital is the seaport Rostock and whose beaches, islands, villages and farms are so loved by former East Germans for vacation. Sparsely populated and with little industry, Mecklenburg Vorpommern has, as of 12 March, 50 Covid-19 cases and no fatalities.

But because Germany as a whole is the eminent economic and social engine of Central Europe, and because of its central manufacturing and technical role in the global economy, it is being looked to by its less economically powerful neighbors to take a leading role in the fight against Covid-19. It's doing that, but at its own speed. Put another way, Germany's fate - its course through the virus over the coming weeks - is hanging in the balance right now. The jury's out on whether this tiered defensive posture of the government will work, but Chancellor Merkel is hoping that what she and her cabinet are doing will be enough.

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