Here’s a rough and ready back-of-the-envelope calculation of how long it might take for government impositions on public life in Germany to fully subside and everyday life to return back to normal.
My calculation is based on two assumptions:
I. There won’t be a vaccine or an effective therapy for Covid-19 available for at least another 12-18 months.
II. In the absence of such an effective vaccine or treatment, the only way to stop the exponential rate of growth of new infections is to reach a sufficient level of ‚herd immunity‘, which experts estimate to be at roughly 60 to 70%. (This is because one person with coronavirus has sufficient social contact to infect on average two to three other people -> exponential growth.
If, however, two of these contacts are already immune (66%), the initial carrier can only infect one other person at most -> stagnation. Simple maths.)
Based on these premises, my rough calculation looks as follows:
The number of intensive care beds in Germany is ca. 28,000. On average, 80% are used at any given point in time, which leaves 20% or 5,600 free for coronavirus patients with a need for intensive care. Let’s assume that the average length of stay of a coronavirus patient in intensive care is a week (7 days). Thus, the capacity of new coronavirus intensive care patients per day Germany’s medical system can handle is 5,600/7 = 800. Let’s further assume that approximately 5% of all people infected with coronavirus will end up needing intensive care treatment. This gives us an upper boundary of 800/0.05 = 16,000 new coronavirus cases per day the hospitals in Germany can handle.
Let’s also say the government manages to fine-tune the severity of its crackdown on everyday life so precisely that there are exactly 16,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases each day until the 55m mark (and thus herd immunity) is reached. Now given that approx. 80% of all people infected with coronavirus develop only mild or sometimes even no symptoms at all, we can assume that roughly the same proportion of people will never know that they’ve been infected (no symptoms, never tested). Let’s be conservative and say the figure is approx. 65%. So for every confirmed case there are 1/0,35 = ~3 actual cases. So for 16,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases each day Germany’s medical system can cope with at most, there are ~48,000 actual cases.
Thus, the bottom line is that it will take 55,000,000/48,000 = ~1145 days of controlled virus spread before herd immunity is reached and exponential growth comes to an end. So even allowing for the fact that the rate of contagion is going to decrease naturally over time because the virus will find fewer and fewer targets as the number of recoverd and immune people grows, as well as that the government will ramp up the number of intensive care beds and other medical facilities in the coming months, we are looking at years of living with a heightened attention for coronavirus before it turns into just another endemic illness and regular nuisance like the flu.
How this heightened attention will translate into government measures to curb public life in order to ensure sufficient social distancing to keep the rate of new infections at manageable levels, I don’t know.
However, even though my calculation is fairly simple and based on a range of debatable assumptions, it seems highly unlikely to me that developments surrounding Covid-19 will give the government enough leeway to scale back their measures within the next couple of months or so, most probably longer. With respect to football, therefore, we will most likely see some kind of restrictions on attending games or congregating in public for quite some time yet - as far as I’m concerned most certainly long enough for this season’s football to be over.
