Pass the salt: The minute details that helped Germany build virus defences by Jörn Poltz and ReutersCarrel
FILE PHOTO: A member of the medical staff shows a used sample container at a test centre for coronavirus disease at Havelhoehe community hospital in Berlin, Germany, April 6, 2020. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch -/File Photo
They are based in Stockdorf, a German town of 4,000 near Munich in Bavaria, and they work at car parts supplier Webasto Group. The company was thrust under a global microscope after it disclosed that one of its employees, a Chinese woman, caught the virus and brought it to Webasto headquarters. There, it was passed to colleagues - including, scientists would learn, a person lunching in the canteen with whom the Chinese patient had no contact.
Christian Drosten, the top virologist at Berlin’s Charite hospital, said Germany was helped by having a clear early cluster. “Because we had this Munich cohort right at the start ... it became clear that with a big push we could inhibit this spreading further,” he said in a daily podcast for NDR radio on the coronavirus.
In Germany, Engelmann said he immediately set up a crisis team that alerted the medical authorities and started trying to trace staff members who had been in contact with their Chinese colleague. “It was a stroke of luck,” said Wendtner, the doctor who treated the Munich patients. “We got all the information we needed from the staff to reconstruct the chains of infection.”
When that colleague turned to borrow the salt, the scientists deduced, the virus passed between them. The colleague became case #5. “The death rate will rise,” said Lothar Wieler, president of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases.
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