No, it is not normal. CCC is being proactive in that they believe that there is a chance of having the same problems as in the last congress, and they want to avoid this, because volunteers are more hesitant to get involved in a risky situation compared to employees.
Also this is a mostly volunteer organization with a limited budget. The cost is kept very low (so everyone who wants to can participate) and no profit is made.
Very likely the go/nogo point to commit to large expenses (eg venue hire) is now and these would not be refundable. Yet participants would expect to be refunded.
Any financial reserves would already be strained by now. Making it a risk for the survival of the organization if it would have to be cancelled again.
And IMO an event with forced masks or other heavy-handed measures would not be worth it. And Germany is very quick to go for mandatory measures compared to other countries.
It is quite common still to go virtual e.g. in the academic community and in any place where there are no commercial consideration or loss of money associated. (Just had the discussion today to move virtual because everyone else does as well)
The Congress has been doing this the last two years (labelled RC3). It led to a very different experience (as random interactions just were gone (they tried to avoid this by a JRPG-style web interface)), and there was a notable drop in quality in the lectures. I don't think going virtual works for this kind of event.
The CCC event is a _very_ large (about 20k people, I think?), crowded, indoor event during Peak Hospital Strain season, so it's fairly close to a worst case.
Even in normal times, there was always tongue-in-cheek the concept of the "Kongressseuche" (congress plague), because many people got (mildly) ill with a cold or the flu. :)
The 2019 Congress plague was highly likely to have been covid in some cases, a number of attendees were quite ill after the event with respiratory symptoms. Given that covid had been circulating in Europe since at least November 2019, its not implausible.
Other years there were colds... The usual... But the 2019 edition was real nasty.
I didn't notice anything worse during 2019 than during previous years. There were fewer calls to sanitation, if anything, or perhaps the calls didn't stand out to me anymore. Either way, while you're probably right that the earliest cases of covid were probably already there, it's not as though "the congress flu" (never heard anyone call it 'plague', either) was because of covid, or because of covid even just that year.
I vaguely remember reading about the first handful of reported infections here on HN at the very end of 2019, somewhere around NYE. It was a very strange feeling to start the year with.
> "the congress flu" (never heard anyone call it 'plague', either)
I think the "Seuche" in Congress-Seuche falls somewhere in between. I can attest that at least Congress-Seuche has been in use in the past, somewhat analogous to the annual "Wiesnseuche" flu wave in Munich during and after the Oktoberfest.
Last time congress happened, I didn't speak German at all. I just meant the translation; that I've only ever heard it called flu (from what I remember). Things being lost in translation isn't new though, so of course I trust that the German word can mean that :)
The annual post congress malaise goes by many names. Conflu, CCCbola, Congress Plague, Congress Colds, "I didn't drink that much tschunk why do I feel shit a week later", etc ;)
As far as I know, this year would have been at Hamburg again where the number of participants is capped to ~12k. So it would have been slightly smaller than in Leipzig.
Which is a pity, it will be notoriously hard to get tickets.
My dream would be ICC Berlin with it's spectacular architecture, it's also huge.
The only drawback is that it's currently standing empty with no plans for it's future.
Trouble with ICC (besides it being closed for years now) is, that it's quite small on the inside. You could say it's a landed space ship that's smaller on the inside. You could of course also use some halls (14 & 15, because of the bridge for example) of the fairgrounds next door, but I guess all of that had already been discussed when they moved to Hamburg for the first time and when they moved to Leipzig from Hamburg.
Currently, not really for most events. Big concerts, trade shows, sports games, etc. are happening without any restrictions.
Moving into winter, the general situation can change and many people are expecting more strict regulations.
And then there’s the question of community and personal assessments. C3 is an event run by a community that tends to be note cautious with respect to risks. And, as the announcement says, "[w]hat might be possible would not be a Congress".
Basically, if a state parliament identifies a "concrete danger for the functioning of the health care system", they can impose certain additional measures. For instance "hygiene concepts" for events may be required, next to obligatory mask wearing and social distancing.
I was at a conference with around 1000 attendees in Germany this summer. The organizers put out a lot of recommendations for visitors regarding Covid (wear masks, be vaccinated, test yourself before and after the event, etc.), but none could be enforced on site since there was no legal basis for it. The result was that precautions were largely ignored by everyone at the event. The aftermath was that the entira orga team, most presenters on stage and (as far as I could judge by social media) a large number of attendees contracted Covid.
My personal take from this was a) FFP2 masks work - I strictly wore one indoors and didn't get sick b) things are not back to normal, despite what some people say. I don't remember this many people getting sick after an event before Covid.
While I do think CCC made the wrong call here, probably ending Congress for good, let's just assume that the kind of people who attend Congress may not be the most healthy of the bunch to begin with.
> (wear masks, be vaccinated, test yourself before and after the event, etc.)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> The result was that precautions were largely ignored by everyone at the event.
You don't know if the attendees were vaccinated. You don't know if/how they tested. When I got vaccinated, and also when there wasn't a wave, I got more lax. It requires focus and attention span to follow the precautions. Except for vaccination. That's a shot, perhaps some side effects, and you're good to go for a while. Masks have more adverse side effects. And I say that as someone who has a needle phobia, got vaccinated multiple times, but also who wears glasses and prefers the fresh air over the mask (nausea).
I've also done self-tests which, in start turned out nothing, and then once it onset (I already felt ill) suddenly bingo.
> My personal take from this was a) FFP2 masks work
> I strictly wore one indoors and didn't get sick
N=1
Masks primary role is to ensure you don't spread COVID, not that you don't contract it.
The more plausible explanations that you don't got COVID is that you were a) lucky b) vaccinated c) used more precautions like social distancing / didn't frolic around the crazy 'social' people who YOLO.
With masks it requires cooperation in order for it to work. It doesn't work like a condom: put one on, be protected. Everyone puts one on (a good one, as you asserted, though even a mediocre one is 'Good Enough') and then the chance it gets spread is minimal.
A tight fitting (in occupational health this means "proved via fit testing") N95/FFP2 or higher filtering facepiece respirator is excellent protection for the wearer regardless of what anyone else is or isn't wearing. Assuming of course that the wearer doesn't remove the mask to eat something, etc.
Masks, which can be loose fitting and have lower filtration performance, are where you really need everyone wearing them since they perform best as source control. But for those who want to be more cautious, wearing a N95 class "mask" (FFR) even if others around you are not masking is still highly effective.
The more plausible explanations that you don't got COVID
How you got to/from the conference is also a huge factor. Spending a lot of time in packed airplanes and crowded international terminals are probably at least as big a risk factor as the conference itself.
I believe there was a study ranking masks' protective value for the wearer as: tight-fitting FFP2/N95 > surgical mask > FFP2/N95 with bad fit (since they are so dense that you're effectively breathing unfiltered air through the gaps unless there is a tight-ish seal)
Bad fit can be anything between "barely prevents direct lines of sight up the nostrils" and "almost but not quite perfection". I'd give very little on the part of the result that says "surgical can be better than badly fit FFP2/N95"
High numbers are not a problem if the healthcare is not overwhelmed. The cases have been ever less severe and even last winter the measures were much tougher than needed.
We can't always keep walking on our toes because something might happen.
Read a bit behind mainstream, we are not fully overloaded yet but hospitals are getting critically full, it is doctors ringing the alarm, our health care workers are still understaffed, the situation here at least is quite precarious, even if noone wants to talk about it loud.
The narrative that's coming out of the CDC had been shifting over the last week - get ready for Omicron V2, and Governor Pritzker and others are bringing back mask mandates. It's clear that the government knows stuff we are not ready for.
Europe is ahead, as usual, with new Covid variants, so the CCC is adequately prudent.
Is there any good place for information about emerging variants? The ECDC page mentions a few ones being monitored but no indication of when they were first detected.
Germany tends to be more risk averse than the UK with regards covid.
While in the UK for political reasons covid is regarded as "over", in many other countries... Restrictions are highly likely to come back over the winter if the health systems come under pressure.
No, not at all. But the entirety of CCC isn't "normal", C3 isn't just some command line Oktoberfest. CCC identifies a lot with greater-good responsibility and that's not really compatible with the position of "I'll pretend the pandemic does not exist unless authorities force my hand" that a commercial event organizer would take.
You are the one trying to force your partisan view on the volunteers who didn't want to risk their health for an event that probably wouldn't be fun anyway due to likely COVID restrictions.
I do not tend to defend the CCC. But in this case, I think is the right call. It is just they believe it is not socially responsible. I think is a valid point of view, specially from an association which says to be socially engaged.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? You've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Fortunately you've also posted quite a few good comments, so this should be easy to fix.
Independently of the truth of your statements - your comments would be better received (and, more importantly, help preserve the quality of Hacker News) if you were a little bit less...emotionally charged in your language.
Honest question: other than the phrase "It's been a disaster of a Government with disastrous policies" which is really negative, but I still consider it a valid point of view. What is emotionally charged in the language?
I feel frustration, but I do not see anything too emotional. Except that in HN you have to be a robot to post?
We might have slightly different ideas of what "emotionally charged" means, or I might have used the wrong phrase. Part of what I'm objecting to is sentences like "amusing that people get so triggered when people's objectively bad policies".
You may not consider "amusing that people get so triggered" to necessarily be "emotionally charged", but it certainly doesn't provide a lot of information or value to HN, and I think that it'll stir up other people's emotions.
Similarly, "objectively bad policies" is a very strong assertion to phrase something with a lot of political dialog around it, and like much of that other political dialogue, doesn't do a whole lot to back it up.
Memorably (to me) in Berlin they at various points banned drinking beers outdoors, implemented a 10 or 11pm (can't remember) curfew, and other absolutely pointless reactionary measures.
The guidance seemed to be randomly generated at times, and kept changing.
> The current health minister kept saying how there are no negative side effects whatsoever from the AZ vaccine until it was finally pulled off the market in Germany.
While I'm not familiar with the reasoning in Germany, in general in most countries the AZ vaccine has been discontinued (or at least largely discontinued; most places still use it for people who are allergic to an ingredient shared by the mRNA ones) because it is less effective than the mRNA ones, and believed to be _much_ less effective for Omicron.
After the policy change when Germany finally got their hands on BNT(after the US bought up all the stock), doctors actively dissuaded people with heart or other conditions from getting AZ shots.
EDIT: yes, there was talk about banning it after months of denial. And its my mistake for conflating other EU countries that care about their citizens with Germany, which clearly doesn't.
> But what's more important is that Lauterbach(the current health minister) had a plan to drastically reduce emergency beds right before Covid(I don't remember if they actually did).[1]
Lauterbach, who was not health minister at the time, is reported as saying it is likely there are too many hospitals in central locations rather than smaller clinics spread out. It's not his plan and he explicitly calls its specifics "wrong and overstated."
(And he's not wrong - in Berlin one can get amazing treatment in any specialty in our hospitals - if one could get a referral from a GP, which there aren't any of.)
Tags are extremely useful for people who want to ignore arguments based solely on who is making them. I really am not a fan of how popular they are getting.
But I don’t care about the "who", I care about their arguments. The user in question has shown with their arguments, that they are like a tabloid paper, not only do you have to take what they write with a grain of salt, it’s better to start from the assumption they are lying. It’s the same reason I use the Axel Springer (German publisher of Europe’s biggest tabloid BILD) blocklist, so visiting their sites takes an extra click.
edit: If I cared about the who, I’d remember the names.
It's normal for event organizers to still be careful and limit and/or cancel events. There's little government action on this nowadays (although there might be some more enforcement this winter).
Germany is (sadly) not running a China-style Zero Covid plan.
Especially considering the chaos congress was, even before covid, known for the "hacker pest", a type of flu that pretty much every attendee would contract due to bringing together so many people from different regions for a week (also known as cccebola). The organizers want to avoid the same occuring with BA.5 or an even newer Covid variant.
Having a 2 to 3 week lockdown every few months would be far preferable over the current situation where you constantly have to be on the lookout yourself and will still get infected anyway, resulting in weeks of being unable to work due to long covid.
If you've had long covid, even when vaccinated (as in my case), you'll realize why stricter measures are so important.
Most local ccc chapters, e.g., Chaosdorf, still enforce a strict vaccination + daily tests + FFP2 masks rule for their spaces, for the same reasons.
One of the major features of the chaos congress was that it was purely run by volunteers, including the emergency response team. And pretty much no one with that knowledge would support an event like the congress in the current pandemic situation.
