Thread by @jonworth

This thread is about a very personal lucky escape - not catching Coronavirus and what happened next

Generally throughout the pandemic so far my view has been that Germany has been coping comparatively well. Now I am not so sure...

So to the story...

On 8 Oct, my partner and I moved flat from Kreuzberg (near Gleisdreieckpark) to Neukölln (near S/U Hermannstrasse). Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg has been rivalling Neukölln and Mitte as the 3 Berlin Bezirke with the highest COVID cases per 100k inhabitants

On Sunday 18 Oct we went by 🚲 to Friedrichshain to have dinner with 2 friends.

Turns out that a person they had met the previous day - 17 October - had tested positive, but that was not known at the time.

By Wednesday 21 Oct, one of the people we had met had COVID symptoms, went to a private clinic to get tested on Thursday 22 Oct, and was confirmed positive early morning Friday 23 Oct. He then called us to tell us.

That made my partner and I "Kontaktpersonen der Kategorie I" - i.e. people who had contact with a high risk person. Those people are under a legal obligation to self isolate or get tested.

Having called the central Corona hotline, we were told that we ought to inform the Gesundheitsamt where we live about the situation.

We called the Gesundheitsamt Neukölln. And were promptly told they have no record of our friend's positive test...

... because he is in Friedrichshain, we are in Neukölln, and we need to wait for Gesundheitsamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg to do its job.

The tone was very negative - that we were wasting their time telling them what had happened, and we should let the authorities do their job.

Can we get a test? we asked, and we told that no, that would not be possible, and that we should wait for 📞 from Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

So we did what our friend in Friedrichshain had done - took matters into our own hands and checked online where we could get tested - Praxis Kosova on Karl-Marx-Strasse was the nearest: praxiskosova.de

We went there, queued 30 mins in the street, got tested.

Test mid morning on Friday 23 October, test results - *negative* for both of us - by 7pm on Saturday 24 October. Phew. Relief.

But 85 Euro poorer, as the Krankenkasse will not cover the cost of a test if you have no symptoms...

Meanwhile back in Friedrichshain, our friend who tested positive was diligently collating the contact details of the people he had met - including us.

And still today, >4 days on from having tested positive, and >10 days from his contact with the first positive tested person...

... has still not heard anything from the Gesundheitsamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

That means that my partner and I have also *still* not been contacted, even though - had our friend not himself having been so diligent - we could still be going about our lives wilfully unaware that we were "Kontaktpersonen der Kategorie I".

The info in the Corona Warn App has been little better.

On Sunday 25 October, the day after our negative tests, and 48 hours after our friend's test result, the app showed Red "1 Exposure, Increased Risk", but of course can't tell us *who* it was.

Maybe this is just bad luck. Maybe we ended up with the wrong person on the phone at Gesundheitsamt Neukölln. Maybe these calls to track us down might yet come (but then it is all a very slow process).

But the system does not *seem* to make the most of the information people are willing to provide. We, the potentially infected people, want to help break the chain. To help establish who is positive or not, as quickly as possible, but there is no way to feed this into the system.

And - thankfully - our friend is steadily recovering, and hopefully will be fine.

But the whole process leaves me with a lot more questions than answers...

/ends