eugyppius

Germany now pretends to open, while imposing such onerous restrictions on public life (ridiculous capacity restrictions, mandatory appointments at places like fitness studios, antigen tests required everywhere) that nobody will bother and the de facto lockdown can continue.

Always a bit of a mind-f*ck when people say assert "everything is open" and it turns that there is a maze of strangling restrictions on everything

And a lot of it is more than inconvenience. You have a nontrivial chance of coming up false positive with every quick test. At which point you and immediate family are in 48-hour quarantine and the tracers are hunting down all your contacts.

I don't know the political situation in Germany, but the US example suggests that a few leaders with the minimal testicular fortitude required to buck the guidelines (DeSantis etc.) can make a seismic difference in the overall direction of policy. That may be what it takes there

The point has been made that Governors DeSantis and Abbott almost single-handedly stopped the US from sliding into Europe's lockdown nightmare because they proved beyond a doubt that you don't need to do that crap