Mortality, Wastewater Surveillance Show Continued Presence
Differences between countries are becoming apparent
As I am spending a month in Tunisia, I am a little concerned about a recent upswing of mortality numbers here to 0.03 per 100K, butting head with German mortality, which has been falling for weeks and stands currently at 0.02 per 100K.
French mortality is stagnant, if not increasing a little, at 0.04 per 100K. Could it have reached its natural bottom value and France needs to simply live with 30-40 people dying of Covid?
Washington State's mortality is equally stagnant at 0.1 per 100K and, over the last three years, it has never gone below 0.06 per 100K. Again, the 6 daily deaths from Covid could be the new normal.
The United States's mortality is slowly decreasing to values below the ones during the first years of the pandemic, which is a good sign. It is likely, though, that the number will remain around the current 0.07 per 100K and that 200 daily deaths from Covid are the new normal.
Wastewater surveillance data show a continued presence of the virus in the USA and in Germany. These data also show a much greater presence in the USA compared to Germany, which fits well with the difference in mortality. In other words: Germany is getting out of the pandemic much better than the US.
In June 2020, half a year into the pandemic, after Apple and Google had come up with a way to use Bluetooth for distance calculation between phones and publish an API for it, Germany released the Corona-Warn-App for personal contact tracing, an app that would not allow the government to spy on its users. The app was made interoperable with contact tracing apps from Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland. While this was great feat, it showed the fractured European landscape. Notably, France and Britain were came up with an invasive (meaning government snooping), battery-hogging app that almost nobody installed. The United States were even fractured within. Only a few states offered an app and these were not interoperable (if they had them at all).
The German app was good but it was not made available in non-German application repositories (notably AppStore and Google Play), which meant that some residents of Germany could not install the app, or only with great difficulty (yours truly included). Strangely so, this was never resolved. I suspect a deeply rooted German ignorance of the reality of immigration into Germany an equally deep-rooted ignorance of anything IT.
Has the app prevented infections? Possibly but it is hard to say, largely because of the anonymous nature of the app. What is known is that over the last three years, the app has given out 9 million proximity warnings and has thus contributed to a personal awareness of the disease.
The Corona-Warn-App will cease to function at the end of April 2023. Here is a screenshot of it, because I do want to remember it fondly.
The warning API will hopefully remain a part of iOS and Android because there are other viral diseases already in the making and it is just a matter of time when they will start to spread.
