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Funny, I just heard today that Oktoberfest was going to be cancelled. That's hardly a back to normal situation.

Germany is one of the few countries that has managed to do test+trace well enough to contain outbreaks. It's definitely a model to be copied .. but you have to get the testing in place first!

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And yet shops up to 800sqm are open again and the shopping street in in front of me apartment (in a larger German city) is crowded.

And no, we didn't contain the outbreak. But we have 20,000 ICU beds. Unlike France, Italy or Spain, who only have about 5000 each.

While in those countries, people could not be treated for lack of capacity, here in Germany we still have about 50% free ICU beds (as of two days ago, according to the health ministry).

That's why we have low mortality, while still having a pretty large number of infected people.

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