Vox: The mystery of Germany’s low coronavirus death rate

Germany has the fifth-most coronavirus cases in the world, but only a fraction of the death toll that has been seen in other countries. And the reason remains a mystery. “We don’t know the reason for the lower death rate,” Marieke Degen, deputy spokeswoman of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI), told me. [...]

In comparison, Italy has more 74,300 confirmed cases and over 7,500 deaths, which puts its fatality rate at 10 percent. In the United States, the fatality rate is currently at about 1.4 percent according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The huge discrepancy in fatality rates between Germany and Italy is also startling because both countries have some of the oldest populations in the world, according to the Washington, DC-based Population Reference Bureau. The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified people over the age of 60 and people with preexisting medical conditions as being at higher risk of experiencing more severe symptoms from Covid-19. [...]

But outside of Merkel’s forceful speech, Germany has more or less followed similar strategies to confront the spread of the virus as many other countries. “We don’t do anything special compared to other countries,” German virologist Martin Stürmer told me. [...]

But virologist Stürmer believes it is more likely the global fatality rate will be lower when all is said and done. “I think all over the world the rates will go down, because we have so many people with mild symptoms, which are not being tested and therefore they are not reflected in the data,” he said.

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The Red Line: Venezuela

Venezuela, home to the largest proven oil reserves in the world was once the jewel of South America, the envy of the Latin world, but now the country sits on the brink of collapse. Venezuela has gone so far now that other nations like China, Russia, and the US have begun circling like hungry vultures, looking to smash apart the nation and divide up the assets. So this week we sit down and ask where will it all go, how did we get here and what is next for this South American titan. Giancarlo Fiorella - (Bellingcat institute) Nick Mutch - (Conflict Journalist) Christopher Sabatini - (Chatham House).

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The Guardian: What Noma did next: how the ‘New Nordic’ is reshaping the food world

The New Nordic movement is bound by a set of 10 principles that stress sustainability, locality and respect for the natural world. Those ideals may sound familiar, but the scale of what its adherents are accomplishing makes New Nordic potentially far more transformative than any previous food movement. It is reaching beyond farms and fine-dining restaurants, and into halls of power, supermarket aisles, canteens and classrooms. [...]

The New Nordic movement heralded another shift in the world of fine dining. In our current era of climate emergency and brutal inequality, celebrity chefs have transformed again, from ruthless kitchen dictators such as Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White, or mad scientists such as Ferran Adrià, into crusaders for a better world. Where once the dream was to cook for presidents, now the aim is to work with them. Massimo Bottura, the ebullient owner of the three-Michelin-star Osteria Francescana in Modena, was celebrated in the 2019 Time 100 for his work feeding the homeless. José Andrés, the Spanish chef once credited with bringing tapas to the US, now has an accolade far exceeding a Michelin star: a nomination for the Nobel peace prize, for his disaster relief efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. The pursuit of Michelin stars and coffee-table cookbooks has been superseded by pursuing a role in public life. [...]

Two decades ago, Denmark might have seemed a rather unconducive place for a revolution in haute cuisine, let alone in food altogether. Being generous, you could have said that it was a country of open-faced sandwiches, hot dogs and overproof alcohol. But you might also have associated it with the cheapest processed pork in the EU, known for being made in a grim factory from a candy-pink slurry of something that once was a pig. “Back then, all you could get in the centre of Copenhagen was bad French food or bad Italian food,” the food writer Andrea Petrini told me. “There was no Danish food culture.” [...]

Around the same time that Redzepi founded Mad, Meyer, who sold his majority stake in Noma in 2013, began testing New Nordic principles far beyond Scandinavia. After mapping the countries of the world on metrics such as economic development, crime rates and biodiversity, Meyer decided to open a restaurant called Gustu in Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, with another talented young Danish chef, Kamilla Seidler, at the helm. Seidler and her team used Bolivia’s fauna and flora to create the restaurant’s idiosyncratic cuisine – llama tartare, alligator escabeche and a lot of quinoa – and brought the restaurant on to the foodie radar. But more importantly, she completed the restaurant’s primary objective: training the restaurant’s Bolivian staff so she could leave Gustu in their hands.

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The Guardian: Golden Dawn: the rise and fall of Greece’s neo-Nazis

Although Golden Dawn’s members sometimes played the game of respectable politics, they were no mere rightwing populists; they were the kind of Nazis you are more likely to read about in history books. Driven by profound racism and antisemitic conspiracy theory, with a fervent devotion to Hitler, Golden Dawn combined street violence with torchlit flag-waving rallies and extreme rhetoric. One of its MPs proclaimed “civil war” to a BBC reporter, while an election candidate promised in front of a documentary crew to “turn on the ovens” and make lampshades from the skins of immigrants, a reference to what Nazi Germany did to Jews, Roma and other minorities in the Holocaust. “The Europe of nations is back,” declared the party’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, at a press conference in May 2012. “Greece is only the beginning.” [...]

Court hearings will end this spring, and a verdict is due shortly after, but Greece has already started to move on. Golden Dawn was wiped out in last year’s general election, and a new conservative government has declared the years of crisis over. Many media outlets only cover the trial sporadically. According to the centrist political commentator Yannis Palaiologos, Greece now has an opportunity to draw a line under the populism of both left and right. “As the various populist myths about the causes and possible solutions to Greece’s crisis have been revealed as delusions and outright lies,” he wrote in a piece for the Washington Post last year, “the fuel that sustained extremism has been depleted.” [...]

Golden Dawn was founded in the early 80s, initially as a Masonic society, according to the investigative journalist Dimitris Psarras, an authority on the party. For many years it remained small and semi-hidden, recruiting its members from Greece’s football hooligan scene. In the late 00s, however, it pursued a new strategy, setting up an “angry citizens” group in Saint Pantaleimon to complain about crime it linked to immigrants, mainly refugees from Afghanistan, who had recently moved into the area. Many lived in poverty or destitution, trapped by a Greek asylum system that didn’t work and an EU regulation that would not let them travel elsewhere, but a community was starting to put down roots; some Afghans had opened shops and cafes on the square. [...]

The country’s political and media class was split over how to treat Golden Dawn, since Greece’s constitution does not allow for the banning of political parties. In late 2013, when parliament voted to suspend the party’s state election funding and waive its MPs’ immunity from prosecution, the move was opposed by a minority of leftwingers, one of whom argued that Golden Dawn was “not a classic Nazi party”, since it set itself in opposition to “the dominant bourgeois forces”. In 2014, several defence lawyers for Golden Dawn members who were under investigation appeared on a TV chat show to argue that while they didn’t support the party’s views, they were doing their jobs in the interest of democracy and free speech.

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The Prospect: The political rivalry that shaped the Middle East

Journalist Kim Ghattas joins the Prospect Interview to explain the political conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran—where did it come from, and how has it fundamentally transformed the region? She also talks about lessons from the Arab Spring, and why her own background growing up in Lebanon means she’s able to tell stories that challenge popular Western narratives.

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