Coronavirus hit China, Iran, Italy, South Korea, now it hits Germany.
Going to be "interesting". We Germans love bureaucracy and hierarchy.
There is no central government in Germany, a lot of things are up to the
individual Federal Lands. In this case, it probably means that there
won't be any "drastic measures" unless every Land agrees (which is
unlikely). Can be good or bad, I don't know.
Our hospitals and laboratories are not in the best shape, because they
all have to operate as capitalist businesses. They have to save as much
money as they can, so they simple are not prepared to deal with
situations like this. We didn't have enough doctors and nurses and
equipment before this all started, now it's going to be bad.
And we depend on China. A lot. Now some goods are no longer being
shipped from China to us ... oops.
I'm very lucky that I work for a company where doing home office is a
common thing. Some of my colleagues live a few hundred kilometers away,
some on the other side of the globe. Pretty much all of our
infrastructure is designed for this. I'm a sysadmin and we always
pretend that we're someplace else, i.e. "oh, you can only access system
$x if you're at the office" is a big no-no. Our employees *always* use a
VPN, it's well tested and stable. It's still going to be a bit of a
challenge because now pretty much *everyone* is at home (how do you do
meetings, how do you handle paper, we sell training courses where people
come to us, ...), but it won't hit us *hard*.
As long as I can do basic shopping and as long as basic infrastructure
like water supply keeps working, I can just sit this out. Me,
personally, I'm probably good. I just work from home now and avoid
crowds.
