BERLIN – Susan Tabbach feels drained. She worked full-time with her three young children at home and cared for them during lock-in, while worrying about her older parents not being vaccinated.
She sees little prospect of relief. “I’m just exhausted,” said the 41-year-old architect from Aachen, a German city near the Belgian-Dutch border. “At least I didn’t go down without explaining myself first.”
Europeans of all ages, from children to grandparents, are becoming exhausted with a crisis now entering its second year, the end of which seems beyond the horizon. Vaccinations are progressing at an icy pace, Covid-19 cases are increasing again and increasingly unpopular governments are imposing new restrictions on a weekly basis.
The mixture of pessimism, resignation and anger contrasts with feelings of optimism elsewhere in the West, especially in the US and the UK, where vaccinations are progressing much faster and attention is shifting to the reopening of the economy.
Germany is a striking case of changing happiness. The country did well in the first phase of the pandemic last year, and the authorities received praise for keeping infections and deaths low. Now, after four months of largely ineffective locks and with a slow and bureaucratic vaccination regime that has so far not gained momentum, infections are rising again and the government is seeing the polls drop.