Without thread slide & making this an interesting thread what did the Germans do that the UK didn't they seem to have fared far better than us? I'm sure the answer is on the dark side but don't want to go there for health reasons
A couple of ideas, as seen from a end user, bear in mind I'm in the Deep South which is as like to the north as Kent is to Yorkshire...
The healthcare system is financed differently, is more decentralised, and has greater independence from the government, so there's more slack for a situation like this.
We had testing and contact tracing fairly quickly: Youngest Son was in a classroom with someone who tested positive right at the start of the outbreak, and both kids in the school were immediately put in 2 week quarantine a week before the generalised lockdown was even discussed, so the spread is being carefully monitored and tracked.
That said, the lockdown wasn't ever as strict as the UK.
I think there's a cultural side, and this is a sweeping generalisation here: I think Germans are good at organising quickly in a crisis, our political system is a bit more localised and relatively resilient in situations like this and politicians have to be fairly honest in their appraisal of the situation (For example,
this announcement about the lockdown from our state president -turn on subtitles for a translation). I think it also helped that a lot of the guidelines were presented by the Robart Koch institute which is a semi-independent federal public health institute.
Most people took the lockdown fairly seriously and conformed to it, this may be a cultural thing, (although I live in a part of Germany that is notoriously conformist, others elsewhere may see a different picture). There's a strong sense of the responsibility of the individual in this culture, & I think the feeling was that the health system was doing what it could, so we needed to do the same.
I wish we could get the locals to think the same way about Climate Change, but we are the home of Mercedes...
