Have you got any links for that?
German manufacturers didn't receive an order from the German government till March and it was for 10k over the year (FT article).
Separately, the BMJ has social distancing advice at the middle of March. China reported its first deaths on the 10th Jan and locked down in Feb for a month and a half.
The first reliable diagnostic tests - the "WHO tests" which the Trump administration famously refused to use, until it became clear the early US-made tests were too inaccurate - were first completed in Germany on January 16th, developed by a consortium of private sector and university researchers:
https://www.dzif.de/en/researchers-develop-first-diagnostic-test-novel-coronavirus-china
On 23rd January, a group (led by virologist Christian Drosten, who is now a leading expert in Germany) published their research into rolling out the tests, which the WHO endorsed. By the end of February more than 1.6 million of the tests had been manufactured in Germany, for a combination of export and domestic use. By mid-March, four million. According to Drosten, Germany is now conducting something like 500,000 tests per week.
Meanwhile, the EU procurement scheme for coordinating bulk-buying a necessary equipment (meaning PPE at first, and then, later, ventilators) first met on January 31st - the UK supposedly missed out on taking part due to "missing an email", but we now know that British officials attended at least four of these meetings (the latest being 13th March):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...o-buy-covid-19-medical-supplies-say-officials
I think I had my wires crossed on the dates for the actual orders for the ventilators versus when prep work started that would lead to the orders actually going in - strangely, the Economist reports an order of 16,000 back in mid-March, but the FT says 10,000. Not sure whether these are the same order rounded up/down by someone somewhere, or whether they're two separate orders, but you're right that the actual
orders came three weeks ago. (That's a really strange one to me considering how much caution they were exercising in everything else!)
You can read all the minutes from meetings of NERVTAG - the sub-committee within SAGE which specifically advises the UK government about the crisis - here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/new-and-emerging-respiratory-virus-threats-advisory-group
The 3rd February meeting is where social distancing, widespread wearing of masks, further measures, etc., are first raised as possible policy responses, although it wasn't for another couple of weeks before uncertainty and hedging became replaced with recognition of what was becoming inevitable. There's a real sense in the minutes that the experts didn't want to act too hastily - why? I'm really not sure. These are world experts within their fields, but they seemed to be very reticent to take the warnings of Chinese and WHO scientists too seriously. (Something I've been wondering, but which I haven't seen come up, is what happened with Tamiflu/avian influenza just over a decade ago - when there was a minor scandal that so many governments stockpiled a drug that proved ultimately unneeded.)
There are some other systemic things that seem to be helping in Germany, from what I've been reading. One thing that does seem to have helped Germany is that the Robert Koch Institute has been effective at developing a national response strategy in tandem with the pharmaceutical and biochemical industry, but at the same time the decentralised nature of the healthcare system across the country means getting things like new testing kits out and into the hands of those who can do tests is very efficient - by contrast, bodies like Public Health England have a much wider health remit, so don't have the same capacity and in-house expertise just for epidemiology, while at the same time they're having to micro-manage for too much. Also of note is that the kind of public-private-academic coordination and cooperation that led to that first test being developed in anticipation of its necessity is now something that the UK government wants to try and copy, as of March 27th, when it was announced by Gove.
Conversely, when it comes to chemical reagents and manufacturing ventilators and PPE, I think there's going to be quite an ugly confrontation between southern and northern Europe over who gets priority over which of them get exported...
