It has been a year since Bavaria fell into the corona freeze when all public life was shut down on November 2, 2020. Now it looks like the country is facing dark months again – despite vaccinations, full football stadiums and regular school operations. Perhaps it is true what Christian Bernreiter, the head of the Bavarian District Association, prophesied on Tuesday: The worst phase of the pandemic is yet to come.
Because, unlike last year, the virus is now affecting exhausted employees in hospitals, care facilities and health authorities. The number of intensive care beds has decreased by 20 percent because there is simply a lack of staff. A third of the Bavarian population is still unvaccinated. Especially among this group, the virus is likely to spread explosively.
The division in society feared by Prime Minister Markus Söder has long occurred. And it is noticeably deepening. In Burghausen, the AfD held a vigil for the “vaccinated dead”. One might think that this is crazy, but it is a sign that significant sections of society are no longer accessible for arguments. The polarization is not limited to vaccination: If you want to break up a family celebration, you only have to address the issues of gender politics or refugees – and the coffee table is transformed into an ideological battlefield. And with the rising energy prices, the next topic is already looming, which could drive people from the bourgeois camp onto the streets in large numbers and bring them up against “those up there” in politics and the media.
These are bleak prospects, because society should stand together in solidarity right now. Unfortunately, the old virtue of the socis has gone out of fashion.