COVID-19: A Look at the Worst Mistakes Made in the Coronavirus Pandemic
“At the time, we were harshly criticized for our prediction that a second wave was on its way,” says virologist Brinkmann. Some scientists, she says, even lent credence to the idea that the worst had passed. “It was so extreme that I even doubted my own predictions,” she says. The message should have been, she says, “that we’re going to pursue a low-incidence strategy until we have a majority of the population vaccinated.” Instead, she says, there was “no plan at all, zero strategy.” And rather than acting, “we were as dormant as Sleeping Beauty in the summer of 2020,” she says.
From the mid-October meeting between governors and federal ministers attended by Meyer-Hermann in the Chancellery to the moment the wave ultimately subsided in June 2021, around 80,000 people died from the coronavirus in Germany. During Christmas week of 2020 alone, nearly 5,900 people died.
“Sometimes, five patients died in our COVID ward on a single day,” says Munich physician Wendtner. When a living will was in effect, he says, medical and nursing staff often were only providing “palliative care for the critically ill nursing home COVID patients, injecting morphine to relieve respiratory distress, and then they were dead within a few hours.”
Looking back, German Ethics Council Chair Buyx agrees that “the lockdown light in autumn 2020 was probably too soft.” She views the decision to impose those late and lax contact restrictions as a “real mistake” – as did nearly all the experts interviewed for this analysis. Too many people had to die, Buyx says.
2. The Needs of Children Were Never Taken Seriously
The Ethics Council, though, which has since published a detailed review of the crisis, has also identified another elementary error: How the country has dealt with children and youth. “They just never became the top priority.”
Indeed, one of the first major controversies in the pandemic, in May 2020, involved children. Virologist Drosten and his team had discovered that school-aged children could carry a viral load in their throats nearly as great as that in adults, meaning they could presumably be just as contagious. The tabloid Bild newspaper picked up on a dispute between scientists over the statistics in a preliminary version of the study, one that was resolved a short time later, and ran with the headline: “Drosten Study on Contagious Children Grossly Inaccurate.” This paved the way for another narrative, namely that “children are not drivers of the pandemic.” Some people “just didn’t want to hear that children can also spread the virus,” says virologist Friedemann Weber of the University of Giessen. “At the same time, anyone who has children knows that they spread disease. Why would that be any different with a pandemic virus?”
This resulted in the creation of two camps in Germany that stood in irreconcilable opposition to each other: While some wanted to prevent children from getting infected at all costs, also to protect vulnerable elderly people, others downplayed the dangers posed by the virus and warned more about the psychological consequences of masks, lockdowns and school closures. This created an artificial opposition with fatal consequences. Children’s’ needs weren’t taken seriously and they weren’t adequately protected from the virus.
It was a major mistake of the pandemic “not to think of infection control and psycho-social child protection in concert,” says infectious disease specialist Jana Schroeder, chief physician at the Institute for Hospital Hygiene and Microbiology at the Mathias-Spital Foundation hospital group in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In January 2022, Schroeder and seven other experts, including child and adolescent psychotherapists, released a statement calling for just that.