some news from the (store)front:
first shop I went to had a nice advisory at the door how to behave with nice images and stuff. among the reasonable ones (don't sneeze into people's faces and wash your hands tard) they also advised to use cashless payments... you're not getting my data that easily! but more importantly, I have zero urge to punch in my pin on a number pad that has been abused the whole day without ever getting wiped down.
store itself was stocked as any normal day, one type of water was missing but that was probably a delivery issue since the less carbonated one was still almost full.
anyway, wheeled my groceries to checkout, where the next measure was waiting for me - cash is only to be placed on the counter, never handed over directly. apparently it's not the cash that's dirty. or the boxes I handled less than a minute earlier...
next shop for some other stuff had no advisory, but a bigger surprise at checkout. not only were there lines taped off on the floor, because keeping 2 meters distance seems to be too difficult for people, they had a whole screen draped around the register. imagine hooking a transparent tarp to the ceiling and that's pretty much what it looked like. complete with nice in- and out "catdoors" where the food goes through. hilariously no one thought about how to handle the cash (this shop still handled it directly), so you had to reach in/out to exchange it.
but gotta say, as silly as it looked it made a lot more sense than shop number 1, chances some tard coofing right across the counter are pretty high, especially when you sit there all day long.
So Italy has some plague spreading dipshits too?
yeah, well, they outdid even the chinese in that regard with the whole "let's show everybody how we're not racist by hugging & kissing some asians" back when china was already scrambling to contain it.
That's certainly simpler, but as a monocausal factor just as unlikely. NRW's infection rate rose parallel to that of other states, most notably Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. NRW just had it the worst. Besides, business ties to China would explain why (and how) it ended up spreading in certain areas, but not its mortality rate or further rate of infection since then, especially not since the travel restrictions.
There's probably not one single reason for these statistical differences, and as I've just looked up more recent stats (while also comparing individual cities with similar population sizes like Nuremberg and Dresden or Kiel and Chemnitz), this difference doesn't seem to be all that significant anymore anyway.
bavaria was a completely different case with different path of infection. car supplier had a meeting with a chinese exec and she infected them, then they infected their families, that was 2-3 weeks before shit hit the fan in italy.
it started for good when people came back from italy, and it was right in the middle of the ruhrgebiet - basically one big ass sprawl. most of the flare ups could either be traced back to italy or back to people traveling from NRW. there were some gaps, but the assumption was always there are asymptomatic/low symptom carriers (iirc it was the same for other countries, the uk one was from italy too, poland was from germany after italy etc.).
plus like everywhere to even show up in statistics you have to be tested, so have some symptoms and/or someone needed to carry it into groups with high-risks to gain a significant foothold.
