Germany's corona detectives led way out of lockdown

As the coronavirus permeated Germany with a speed that was scarcely credible, there was no technology in the world that could track it. Instead, the job of mapping and slowing the advance of the pandemic has been carried out largely by hand, often with little more than a telephone, a fax machine and many cups of coffee. The secret of Germany’s much-lauded contact-tracing system, one of the central pillars of its relative success in managing Covid-19, is not ingenious software nor an all-seeing state. It is an impromptu army of students, off-duty planning inspectors, social workers, police officers, military health workers, administrators and, in at least one case, the local fire brigade.