One January lunchtime in a car parts company, a worker turned to a colleague and asked to borrow the salt.
As well as the saltshaker, in that instant, they shared the new coronavirus, scientists have since concluded.
That their exchange was documented at all is the result of intense scrutiny, part of a rare success story in the global fight against the virus.
Illustration: Yusha
The coworkers were early links in what was to be the first documented chain of multiple human-to-human transmissions outside Asia of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
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.
The Jan. 22 canteen scene was one of dozens of mundane incidents that scientists have logged in a medical manhunt to trace, test and isolate infected workers so that the regional government of Bavaria could stop the virus from spreading.
That hunt has helped Germany win crucial time to build its COVID-19 defenses.
The time Germany bought might have saved lives, scientists said.
Its first outbreak of locally transmitted COVID-19 began earlier than Italy’s, but Germany has had many fewer deaths.
Italy’s first detected local transmission was on Feb. 21.
By then Germany had launched a Ministry of Health information campaign and a government strategy to tackle the virus, which would hinge on widespread testing.
In Germany so far, more than 3,020 people have died of COVID-19. In Italy, with a smaller population, the total exceeds 19,890.
METICULOUS TRACING
“We learned that we must meticulously trace chains of infection in order to interrupt them,” said Clemens Wendtner, the doctor who treated the Munich patients.
Wendtner teamed up with some of Germany’s top scientists to tackle what became known as the “Munich cluster,” and they advised the Bavarian government on how to respond.
Bavaria led the way with the lockdowns, which went nationwide on March 22.
Scientists, including UK Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty have credited Germany’s early, widespread testing with slowing the spread of the virus.
“We all know Germany got ahead in terms of its ability to do testing for the virus and there’s a lot to learn from that,” he said on TV last week.
Christian Drosten, deputy coordinator for emerging infections at Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin, the hospital’s top virologist, 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.
Drosten, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was one of more than 40 scientists involved in scrutiny of the cluster.
Their work was documented in preliminary form in a working paper at the end of last month, intended for The Lancet. The paper, not yet peer-reviewed, was shared on the NDR site.
It was on Monday, Jan. 27, that Webasto chief executive Holger Engelmann told the authorities that one of his employees had tested positive for the new coronavirus.
The woman, who was based in Shanghai, had facilitated several days of workshops and attended meetings at Webasto’s HQ.
The woman’s parents, from Wuhan, had visited her before she traveled on Jan. 19 to Stockdorf, the paper said.
While in Germany, she felt unusual chest and back aches and was tired for her whole stay, but she put the symptoms down to jet lag.
She became feverish on the return flight to China, tested positive after landing and was hospitalized. Her parents also later tested positive.
She told her managers of the result and they e-mailed the chief executive.
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.
The chief executive himself was among them.
“Just four or five days before I received the news, I had shaken hands with her,” he said.
CASE NO. 0
Now known as Germany’s “Case No. 0,” the Shanghai patient is a “long-standing, proven employee from project management” who Engelmann knows personally, he said.
The company has not revealed her identity or that of others involved, saying anonymity has encouraged staff to cooperate in Germany’s effort to contain the virus.
The task of finding who had contact with her was made easier by Webasto workers’ electronic calendars — for the most part, all the doctors needed was to look at staff appointments.
“It was a stroke of luck,” Wendtner said. “We got all the information we needed from the staff to reconstruct the chains of infection.”
For example, Case No. 1 — the first person in Germany to be infected by the Chinese woman — sat next to her in a meeting in a small room on Jan. 20, the scientists wrote.
Where calendar data were incomplete, the scientists said, they were often able to use whole genome sequencing, which analyses differences in the genetic code of the virus from different patients, to map its spread.
By following all these links, they discovered that Case No. 4 had been in contact several times with the Shanghai patient. Then Case No. 4 sat back-to-back with a colleague in the canteen.
When that colleague turned to borrow the salt, the scientists deduced, the virus passed between them. The colleague became Case No. 5.
Webasto said on Jan. 28 it was temporarily closing its Stockdorf site. Between Jan. 27 and Feb. 11, a total of 16 COVID-19 cases were identified in the Munich cluster. All but one were to develop symptoms.
All those who tested positive were sent to hospital so they could be observed and doctors could learn from the disease.
Bavaria closed down public life in mid-March. Germany has since closed schools, shops, restaurants, playgrounds and sports facilities, and many companies have shut to aid the cause.
NOT OVER YET
This is not to say Germany has defeated COVID-19. Its coronavirus death rate of 1.9 percent, based on data collated by Reuters, is the lowest among the countries most affected and compares with 12.6 percent in Italy.
However, experts said more deaths in Germany are inevitable.
“The death rate will rise,” said Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s federal agency and research institute for infectious diseases.
The difference between Germany and Italy is partly statistical: Germany’s rate seems so much lower because it has tested widely.
Germany has carried out more than 1.3 million tests, the institute said.
It is now carrying out up to 500,000 tests a week, Drosten said.
Italy has conducted more than 807,000 tests since Feb. 21, the Italian Civil Protection Agency said.
With a few local exceptions, Italy only tests people taken to hospital with clear and severe symptoms.
Germany’s government is using the weeks gained by the Munich experience to double the number of intensive care beds from about 28,000.
The country already has Europe’s highest number of critical care beds per head of the population, according to a 2012 study.
However, even that may not be enough. A German Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community paper sent to other government departments on March 22 included a worst-case scenario with more than 1 million deaths.
Another scenario saw 12,000 deaths — with more testing after partial relaxation of restrictions. That scenario was dubbed “hammer and dance,” a term coined by blogger Tomas Pueyo.
It refers to the “hammer” of quick aggressive measures for some weeks, including heavy social distancing, followed by the “dance” of calibrating such measures depending on the transmission rate.
The German government paper argued that in the “hammer and dance” scenario, the use of big data and location tracking is inevitable.
Such monitoring is already proving controversial in Germany, where memories of the East German Stasi secret police and its informants are still fresh in the minds of many.
A subsequent draft action plan compiled by the government proposes the rapid tracing of infection chains, mandatory mask-wearing in public and limits on gatherings to help enable a phased return to normal life after Germany’s lockdown.
The government is backing the development of a smartphone app to help trace infections.
Germany has said it would re-evaluate the lockdown after the Easter holiday; for the car parts maker at the heart of its first outbreak, the immediate crisis is over.
Webasto’s office has reopened.
All 16 people who caught COVID-19 there have recovered.
Additional reporting by Markus Wacket and Gavin Jones
With escalating US-China competition and mutual distrust, the trend of supply chain “friend shoring” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fragmentation of the world into rival geopolitical blocs, many analysts and policymakers worry the world is retreating into a new cold war — a world of trade bifurcation, protectionism and deglobalization. The world is in a new cold war, said Robin Niblett, former director of the London-based think tank Chatham House. Niblett said he sees the US and China slowly reaching a modus vivendi, but it might take time. The two great powers appear to be “reversing carefully
As China steps up a campaign to diplomatically isolate and squeeze Taiwan, it has become more imperative than ever that Taipei play a greater role internationally with the support of the democratic world. To help safeguard its autonomous status, Taiwan needs to go beyond bolstering its defenses with weapons like anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles. With the help of its international backers, it must also expand its diplomatic footprint globally. But are Taiwan’s foreign friends willing to translate their rhetoric into action by helping Taipei carve out more international space for itself? Beating back China’s effort to turn Taiwan into an international pariah
Typhoon Krathon made landfall in southwestern Taiwan last week, bringing strong winds, heavy rain and flooding, cutting power to more than 170,000 homes and water supply to more than 400,000 homes, and leading to more than 600 injuries and four deaths. Due to the typhoon, schools and offices across the nation were ordered to close for two to four days, stirring up familiar controversies over whether local governments’ decisions to call typhoon days were appropriate. The typhoon’s center made landfall in Kaohsiung’s Siaogang District (小港) at noon on Thursday, but it weakened into a tropical depression early on Friday, and its structure
Taiwan is facing multiple economic challenges due to internal and external pressures. Internal challenges include energy transition, upgrading industries, a declining birthrate and an aging population. External challenges are technology competition between the US and China, international supply chain restructuring and global economic uncertainty. All of these issues complicate Taiwan’s economic situation. Taiwan’s reliance on fossil fuel imports not only threatens the stability of energy supply, but also goes against the global trend of carbon reduction. The government should continue to promote renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, as well as energy storage technology, to diversify energy supply. It
RSS