At the end of 2020, 90 well-known researchers from Switzerland and Germany insisted on tough corona measures. Your role models: China and Australia. In an NZZ survey, most defend the call, one no longer remembers, others clearly distance themselves.
Medical staff in Shanghai. Unlike Australia, China is still following a strict no-Covid course today.
“Please adhere to the Corona measures,” sounds from the drone between the high-rise blocks. “Control your soul’s desire for freedom,” advises the friendly female voice before the flying loudspeaker whirrs from the upper edge of the picture. The video with the Zero Covid drone, apparently taken on a balcony in lockdown Shanghai in spring 2022, goes around the world. A few days later emerges another video from China, which shows locked people screaming at their windows. Shared thousands of times on social networks, the dystopian scenes become symbols of a failed corona policy.
At that time, the new Omikron variant hit China with full force. And the authorities reacted in a similar way to Wuhan: entire cities were cordoned off, children who tested positive separated from their familiesquarantine camps set up.
Authoritarian corona measures in China: is the country repeating an old mistake?
At the time, Omicron was also spreading in the former zero-Covid country of Australia. However, without lockdowns. There, the Delta variant had already brought down the Australian government’s strict no-Covid strategy. Up until that point, the country had been pursuing policies very similar to China’s, albeit less totalitarian.
And with success, at least from a health point of view: the number of cases in the Australian summer in December 2020 was low, there were practically no corona deaths. Economically, too, things initially picked up again.
When Zero-Covid was still a good example
At the time, many politicians and journalists in high-incidence Europe looked enviously at Australia and China. Researchers and doctors too. Around 340 therefore left the sphere of science and called on European politicians to reduce the number of cases to less than 10 per million inhabitants. Even with low case numbers, regional lockdowns are necessary after outbreaks. Naturally acquired immunity is not an option. At the time the call was published, on December 18, 2020, this value was in the EU an average of 300 cases per million inhabitants – despite tough corona measures in many places. The call was published in the renowned journal “Lancet”; Australia and China were cited as positive examples.
At the same time, the Swiss Federal Council ordered the closure of restaurants, museums and cinemas. In Germany was already on December 16th hard lockdown has come into effect: Schools and most shops there also had to close, strict contact restrictions applied.
Signatories later advised the government
Officially, the document is aimed at the European community of states, but it should also serve as an argumentation aid in interviews and talk shows. The initiator of the call, the German physicist Viola Priesemann, was a welcome guest there. In addition to Christian Drosten and Christian Althaus, then part of the Swiss Covid Task Force, the first signatories included the chairwoman of the German Ethics Council, Alena Buyx, the virologist Melanie Brinkmann, the head of the Standing Vaccination Committee Thomas Mertens and the head of Robert Koch -Institute Lothar Wieler. A year later, the latter, together with Viola Priesemann, were to advise the German federal government on corona issues.
This is how the ‘researchers rate their call today
How do you rate your participation in the call from today’s perspective? A total of 33 of the 92 initial signatories from Germany and Switzerland responded to an NZZ query. Five scientists stated that they did not have time for the survey or expressly did not want to take part in it. The director of the University Hospital Essen, Ulf Dittmer, initially claimed not to have signed the appeal; when asked, he stated that he could not remember.
A total of 14 first signatories, including Lothar Wieler and Viola Priesemann, consider the call to be correct even in retrospect and cite, among other things, the vaccine that was not yet available at the time; the first doses were not administered in Germany until a week later. Two of these 14 researchers still consider a low-incidence strategy to be particularly useful today.
Nine other scientists also rate their participation positively, but with clear limitations. “China, with its rigidity, would no longer be able to serve as an example,” says the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology. Physicians Sandra Ciesek and Jürgen Graf from the University Hospital in Frankfurt see it in a similar way.
Some would no longer sign
Some of the first signatories, including Martin Exner, President of the German Society for Hospital Hygiene (DGKH), and his colleague Peter Walger go one step further. They now consider essential points from the appeal to be obsolete. “The consequences for individuals and society, including for the educational opportunities of our children, are so serious that the strategic goals aimed for at the time can no longer be partially endorsed with today’s knowledge,” says their joint statement.
Both criticize that the change in strategy from the “at that time still partly considered possible” phase of containing the virus to protecting the vulnerable has still not taken place “with the necessary consistency”. In any case, “panic communication and continued alarmism” are counterproductive on the way there. Unreasonable mass tests should now be replaced by wastewater tests, even low-incidence strategies are no longer desirable, lockdowns “no longer justifiable”.
Did researchers get too involved?
The first signatory, Heinrich Nax from ETH Zurich, is now fundamentally questioning such calls. At the time, he signed less out of conviction than out of friendship with his colleagues. He considers the “overzealous” participation of scientists in the political debate about the Corona measures to be a mistake. His concerns, which he expressed to the initiator Viola Priesemann by email together with his signature, that draconian measures could hardly be reconciled with the European constitutions, were not taken into account in the appeal. The physicist Claudius Gros from the Goethe University in Frankfurt describes the demand for measures that are difficult or impossible to implement in democracies as a “prerogative of activists”. He signed because he thought it would make sense to expand the test strategy. “Internally, I had expressed my doubts at the time that the call for measures like those in China and Australia made sense. However, I could not bring myself to change this position. »
The epidemiologist Christian Althaus, on the other hand, who recently on twitter explained that Switzerland had “always recommended a similar model to Sweden” and, even when asked, sees no contradiction between this statement and his participation in the appeal. Unlike his colleagues, he cannot see any political demand for tougher measures in the sense of a zero-Covid policy based on the Chinese and Australian models. Althaus cites Japan as an example of a country that has achieved low case numbers even without lockdowns.
Only one explicitly advocates lockdowns
For the coming autumn, he recommends only a few corona measures – like almost all of the scientists surveyed. Most consider a renewed vaccination of vulnerable groups and – as soon as certain thresholds are exceeded – a mask requirement indoors to be sufficient. Five researchers and doctors, including Lothar Wieler, can also imagine further measures, depending on the circulating variant.
However, hardly any of the researchers surveyed mentioned the terms lockdown, 1 G, 2 G or 3 G anymore. Only first signatory Manfred Herrmann from the University of Bremen can continue to warm to it – “with considerable burdens on the health system and corresponding socio-economic implications”.