Comment by scholzmx on Covid 11/25: Another Thanksgiving · 2021-11-26T11:56:14.602Z · LW · GW

Regarding the situation in Germany: There is no full lockdown. There are 2G (vaccinated or recovered) or 3G (2G or tested) rules in a lot of places which is kind of like a lockdown for unvaccinated people. However, this is rarely checked (at least in my own experience and what I hear from friends) in the south of Germany especially. What I hear from the north, they are a lot stricter.
What is happening is that more and more people start to self impose more or less strict lockdowns even without any government action.

The big current problem is that ICU care is collapsing. And the problem with capacity is that more beds are not helping (which seems to be the common solution people come up with). The problem is the lack of qualified nurses. The head of the RKI (Robert Koch Institute) recently made it clear that already the quality of care on all levels (Not only ICU) is suboptimal as ICU nurses have left after having to overwork for the last year and non-ICU nurses are pulled to fill in and even then it is not enough.

There is also this scary thing that says that at the start of December, every (theoretically) available ICU bed (there are not enough nurses for all beds) will be filled with someone having COVID just from the people infected until last Sunday. So even if starting Monday, Covid would have just vanished, there is nothing we can do to prevent a collapse of our ICU system. Though with plannable operations being pushed back, we are already at a state of triage regardless.

With 95% cases in the ICU (not sure if that number is literally or figuratively) being unvaccinated and ICU Capacity being the current basis for lockdowns and further actions, there is growing discontent from the vaccinated population that tried their best to reduce contacts and show solidarity about the never-ending situation due to - what most perceive- to be the unvaccinated population. There is also the problem that a large part of that group is part/was hijacked by the right-wing movement which makes discourse nearly impossible and the whole situation feels more and more like the fronts we know from the US. That's where the "dictatorship of the unvaccinated" thing stems from and while dehumanising statements were a staple of the Querdenker movement (conspiracy-myth-anti-vax crowd), they are starting to emerge in the pro-vax camp as well which makes the whole situation feel more and more dystopian.