STATS SHOW GERMANY BETTER THAN US IN REOPENING ECONOMY

Facts first. This blurb in CNN is proving to be a good guide in determining whether the U.S. is plunging headlong into the COVID-19 abyss by reopening all 50 states and forcing workers to go their production lines without mass testing and contact tracing.

In his May 21, 2020 article for Asia Times, David P. Goldman said “Germany is slowly returning to work. America hasn’t started to return, and will take a much greater risk if it does so quickly.” Goldman said German workplace mobility has risen from a low of nearly -50 (half as many Germans working as usual) in mid-April) to around -30 (30% fewer working than normal). The gradual improvement in workplace mobility in Germany started when new cases collapsed to below 1,000 a day at the end of April.

“Germany’s death rate per 1 million of population is 99, compared to 286 per million in the United States. Germany began testing earlier (it had produced a million test kits before the first case was diagnosed), and its public health system had almost three times as many hospital beds per capita,” Goldman stressed.

Germany’s reopening entails fewer risks. Many of the Asian economies already are back to work. By Google’s measure, workplace mobility in South Korea is just 2% lower than normal. Taiwan is just 9% below normal, Hong Kong 7% below normal, while Vietnam is 16% above normal. Japan remains 23% below normal, still closer to normal than any Western country. Google data are not available for China.