On December 31, 2019, China informed the WHO of a series of unusual cases of pneumonia – it was the beginning of the corona pandemic
Five years ago, the first reports of a new virus emerged that initially only raged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. What happened next is known. The virus with the scientific name Sars-Cov2 kept the world in suspense for years. At least 20 million people worldwide are said to have died due to Covid infections.
The first infection was reported in Germany on January 27, 2020. On March 8th, the first German died as a result of an infection. The first lockdown came into force two weeks later. It was not until May 2023 that the World Health Organization declared the health emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic to be lifted. What have we learned? What mistakes were made? t-online asked two experts. The virologist Alexander Kekulé and the former mayor of Berlin, Michael Müller, look back.
Alexander Kekulé
“In Germany we had more deaths than comparable countries with less restrictive measures, such as Sweden or Switzerland. The Corona measures have weakened the economy more than anywhere else, left the country heavily indebted and divided society.
The fact that we didn’t have more deaths was primarily due to the common sense of the population and the willingness to support scientifically based measures. Second, our current, essentially pointless, hospital overcapacity has reduced the impact of massive management errors. And thirdly, in contrast to most other countries, politicians were able to solve many problems with their wallets instead of taking targeted and better-founded measures.
Prof. Dr. Alexander Kekulé is a specialist in virology, microbiology and infection epidemiology and was an advisor to the federal government on disease control. As director of the Institute for Medical Microbiology at the University of Halle, he went into regular retirement on September 30, 2024. During the pandemic, he became known through his talk show appearances and his podcast on MDR.
Which measures were perhaps excessive?
In contrast to some of my prominent colleagues, I don’t want to make any judgments yet. But there are many questions that we need to answer scientifically in time before the next pandemic. For example, it is clear that lockdowns and school closings have significantly reduced the number of infections. But we don’t know exactly why that was the case and which individual measures could possibly have been left out.
The SMART strategy I developed (protection of risk groups, masks, avoiding airborne transmission, responsive tracking, rapid tests) has recently been used successfully worldwide. Would it have been possible to avoid lockdowns from the start? There is currently no scientifically based answer to this.
Many other questions are also unresolved. At the beginning of the pandemic, the RKI and its advisors said that the new virus was less dangerous than the flu and would not come to Europe. Would it perhaps have been right instead to first get an idea of the situation and cancel major events for two weeks, call for people to work from home and voluntarily wear masks, extend school holidays and test unclear respiratory infections for Covid?
In his current book, Christian Drosten rejects this suggestion, which I made at the time under the heading “Corona vacation,” because in his opinion it would have been too early. On the other hand, experts and politicians assumed throughout the pandemic that we had to react as early as possible in order not to have to take even tougher measures later.
There is also a similar disagreement on the seemingly simple question of whether children are just as contagious as adults. Instead of stating their well-known positions again in non-fiction books that do not go through a scientific review process, experts of all stripes should finally get together and find common answers to the important questions.
I was wrong here
At the very beginning, I overestimated the importance of contact infections and underestimated that of airborne infections. Due to the parallels with the first SARS pathogen in 2003 and the first reports from Wuhan, I also thought at the time that an infection with SARS-CoV-2 could not only manifest itself as a simple cold. Conveniently, I had a regular podcast on MDR, so I was always able to correct small and large errors in a timely manner.
I was really surprised twice during the pandemic: I really didn’t expect that a vaccine would be developed so quickly. Unfortunately, the second surprise was that the pandemic virus was changing and creating variants much more quickly than I had predicted at the beginning of the outbreak in Wuhan. In science, the number of errors identified increases in proportion to the time interval at which a thesis is verified. If you ask me again in a year, the list of my mistakes will probably be much longer. However, being occasionally corrected by progress is as important to a scientist as losing is to a chess player. We also learn most from our own mistakes.”