German Health Minister announces new initiative to combat heat wave deaths by calling old people, reminding them to drink water

The political circus known as Germany marches on.

“We have to admit that we’re not well prepared to prevent heat deaths in Germany,” former virus pest and enduring political clown Karl Lauterbach declared yesterday. The German Health Minister has announced he will develop a plan to combat summer heat deaths in consultation with various healthcare experts. Envisioned is a system whereby summer temperature spikes trigger protective measures depending on their severity. “For example” – and I swear this is a real line in the linked Tagesschau article and not something I am just making up – “elderly people would be called and warned of the heat and reminded to drink regularly.” As if to further emphasise the poverty of his ideas, Lauterbach says he’ll also consider opening “cold rooms” and “free water dispensers,” as well as funding an app to provide nebulous “information.”

The Corona parallels here are clear, and they go much deeper than the failed 223-Million Euro boondoggle known as the Corona-Warn-App. The truth is that the world lost its mind over a not-very-dangerous virus, and to justify the disproportionate response, our policymakers and the gatekeepers of our public discourse responded not by backing off, but by dialling acceptable standards of risk downwards. They’ve now brought them so low, that even hay fever is sufficient to trigger official mask recommendations.

Hot summer weather, an unremarkable fact of life before 2020, kills primarily the extremely old and sick. These aren’t people who have forgotten to drink water. At any given moment, thousands and thousands are near death, and an increase in environmental stress will push some of them over the edge. Nobody who dies in a heatwave has a long, prosperous life ahead of himself, and vanishingly few of these deaths are even ascribed to the heat by their doctors. They’re determined retrospectively, in excess mortality tabulations.

The familiar rhetorical strategies, honed in the great virus panic of 2020, are back for Lauterbach’s latest circus. First is the reliance upon seemingly appalling yet isolated numbers. “Last year alone there were more than 4,500 deaths” from summer heat, Tagesschau reports, and “In the three summers between 2018 and 2020, more than 19,000 Germans died.” I despair of the media ever reporting death numbers correctly. In 2022, for example, an average of over 2,900 people died in Germany every day. A few thousand excess heat deaths, in this context, is a pretty small number.

Then there’s the attempt to take a quite confined and localised risk and generalise it as widely as possible. “Heat waves don’t only endanger the elderly,” says Tagesschau with very little basis. “Pregnant women, newborns and small children” and “people who work outdoors” are also threatened. Tagesschau naturally can’t be bothered to quantify how many children die of the heat or cite any specific statistics at all; as in the pandemic, risks can be exaggerated freely, but to delimit them you need studies.