By Katrin Bennhold and BERLIN 12 Mar 2020
Chancellor Angela Merkel is on her way out and her power is waning, but in her typically low-key, no-nonsense manner, the German leader on Wednesday laid out some cold, hard facts on the coronavirus in a way that few other leaders have.
Two in three Germans may become infected, Ms. Merkel said at a news conference that reverberated far beyond her country. There is no immunity now against the virus and no vaccine yet. It spreads exponentially, and the world now faces a pandemic.
The most important thing, the chancellor said, is to slow down the spread of the coronavirus to win time for people to develop immunity, and to prevent the health care system from becoming overwhelmed.
“We have to understand that many people will be infected,” Ms. Merkel said. “The consensus among experts is that 60 to 70 percent of the population will be infected as long as this remains the situation.”
Ms. Merkel’s estimates were probably a worst-case scenario, though not wildly out of line with those of experts outside Germany.
Her warning provided a stark contrast to the crimped pronouncements of many other world leaders, among them President Trump, who has mostly played down the contagion. In a televised address Wednesday night, Mr. Trump took a somber tone as he suspended travel from Europe, excluding the United Kingdom, for 30 days.
But while the address was Mr. Trump’s most public acknowledgment of the severity of the crisis, he also criticized the European Union, saying it helped spread the virus to the United States by failing to take sufficient precautions of its own.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has staged photo-ops with scientists at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but with this crisis, as with others, he has seemed to pride himself on following his own advice. “I like this stuff, I really get it,” Mr. Trump said at the C.D.C. “People are surprised that I understand it.”
Ms. Merkel, for her part, spent time studying science before becoming a politician: She is a trained physicist.
On Wednesday, when she addressed her fellow Germans, flanked by the health minister and the head of the public health institute, she took pains to say that the information she was sharing had come from the experts. And that information, she said, informed the public health decisions being made by the authorities.
Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute for public health, said that while health experts currently believe that two-thirds of the population may become infected with the coronavirus, “we don’t know how fast that will happen.”
“But every one of us can figure out that the longer this takes, the better it is,” Dr. Wieler said. “On the one hand, because then the chance that a vaccine will become available increases, and on the other hand, because there is a chance that treatments will be available.”
At the news conference on Wednesday, Ms. Merkel did not make big promises. Her announcement, sober in tone, was more a call to arms.
The chancellor urged Germans to observe restrictions and stand in solidarity with one another, for the common good. ( The New York Times )
