Germany’s meticulous coronavirus testing allowed medics to track the exact moments the virus was transferred between people, the Daily Mail reported.
Citing documentation of the exact moment on Jan. 22 when a car parts company worker passed a salt shaker — and the virus — to another employee, Germany has exemplified a success story in the global fight against the virus, the news outlet reported.
The co-workers in Stockdorf, near Munich, were early links in what was to be the first documented chain of multiple human-to-human transmissions of COVID-19 outside Asia.
The company Webasto came under scrutiny after it disclosed one of its employees, a Chinese woman, caught the virus and brought it to headquarters. There, it was passed to colleagues, including a person lunching in the canteen with whom the Chinese patient had no contact.
The hunt helped Germany win crucial time to build its COVID-19 defenses, the Daily Mail reported. In Germany so far, more than 2,100 people have died of COVID-19.
“We learned that we must meticulously trace chains of infection in order to interrupt them,” Clemens Wendtner, the doctor who treated the Munich patients, told Reuters.
“It was a stroke of luck," he added. “We got all the information we needed from the staff to reconstruct the chains of infection.”
Yet Germany hasn’t defeated COVID-19, the news outlet noted.
Though its death rate of 1.9% is the lowest among the countries most affected, more deaths in Germany are inevitable.
“The death rate will rise,” said Lothar Wieler, president of Germany's Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases, the Daily Mail reported.
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