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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

> Readers considering antivirus software should also be aware that such software – ironically – presents a risk just by its very nature.

My stepfather went to a grey power meeting (a kind of seniors meetup) and the speaker of the day terrified everyone there with talk of viruses.

When I next saw him he proudly told me no longer had any fear of viruses - in fact he had installed 7 different anti-virus products just to be safe. When I asked him where he had found them, he told me he simply googled for them (or maybe yahoo-ed back then) and downloaded them straight off the interweb. I simply could not persuade him that that was not a wise strategy.

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There is a 62 year old man in Germany who went and got 217 Covid vaccines in the span of 29 months.[1] Covid was probably afraid to catch him.

Funny how with Germany's extensive paperwork bureaucracy where every little detail must be recorded and tracked, the healthcare workers couldn't catch this guy earlier.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68477735

> Funny how with Germany's extensive paperwork bureaucracy where every little detail must be recorded and tracked, the healthcare workers couldn't catch this guy earlier.

It's precisely because of this extensive paper-based bureaucracy such things happen, not despite of it.

German bureaucracy is a complete and utter mess. By and large, it's a self-perpetuating end in itself that doesn't serve any purpose other than keeping itself (and the people and organisations involved in it) alive.

Which is more, due to the Germany aversion towards digitization and digital processes (with a misconceived notion of privacy commonly known as "data protection" in Germany often used as an excuse) the data recorded by those bureaucratic processes basically is stored in a gargantuan pile of paper nobody is able to make sense of.

My favourite example of the self-perpetuating nature of German bureaucracy is the story of the chinese tourist who, asking for directions in some administrative building, got mistaken for a refugee.

It took more than a month, including placement in a refugee centre, before the administrative wheel stopped turning and it was realised that he was, in fact, only a tourist visiting Germany.

Do you have a source for that story? Asian refugees are pretty rare here, so it's interesting how they would confuse them for one.

Here you go: (I miss-remembered the duration. He was in the treadmill for two weeks.)

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/chinese-tourist-mista...

https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-tourist-mistaken-for-a-refugee...

Privacy and lack of digitization is big in Germany. There no central vaccination database or similar. You can have an "Impfpass" (vaccination pass) which is a piece of paper with stamps and signatures for your vaccinations. But no one would bat an eye if you "lost" it.

Germany made a lot of mistakes over COVID. There were several cases of testing center scams where people reported more tests than they actually administered. No proof required. There is not a lot of bureaucracy surrounding vaccinations at least not from a patients point of view. So if you forgot or lost your vaccination pass you could probably just get another shot especially if you’re older/at risk.

Not sure why you arw being downvoted, the testing center scams are estimated to have cost more than a billion euros [^1]

and from the experiences I had, the people that ran them, and their sheer abundance, this number is probably a very conservative number, and it doesn't include yet all the ones that operated on the brink of scamminess. There wasn't a need to completely and obviously fake the numbers to funnel a lot of public money into your pockets, often without providing any tangible benefit (no qualified personnel, unreliable tests, inadequate execution).

Way into 2021 many streets in the city I live in had one improvised testing center next to the other, mostly ran by people without any medical qualification, using tutorials from the internet and a process almost designed for corruption, where setting up a test center was a state-funded get-rich-quick scheme for quite a while.

[1] https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/landespolitik/betrug-corona-...

Very rarely do I defend the last government of Germany, but the strategy was to give centers a good margin and low bureaucratic hurdle to maximize the number of testing centers and ensure that everyone can get tested everywhere. Given the seriousness and uncertainty of the situation at the time, I think that was a good call.

And there was required documentation, it was just not checked at the time. Once the situation settled down, the state started clawing back fraudulent claims.

> There is not a lot of bureaucracy surrounding vaccinations at least not from a patients point of view. So if you forgot or lost your vaccination pass you could probably just get another shot especially if you’re older/at risk.

That was by design, to facilitate and speed-up the vaccination process, and in the context, there was nothing wrong with that approach to keep the population safe and the country running.

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