For more than a year, Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder has been praising his state government’s corona policy, claiming that its – including his – policy saved the lives of 130,000 people.

For him as a committed Christian, that was an obligation.

The CSU chairman relies on an assessment by the State Office for Health and Food Safety (LGL) as if it were a neutral authority.

In fact, it is a subordinate agency of the Free State that is under the supervision of the CSU-led Bavarian Ministry of Health.

Timo Frasch

Political correspondent in Munich.

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In September 2021, the FAZ asked the LGL on what basis it based its assessment of the 130,000 lives saved.

The answer was brief: Various model calculations showed "that the hypothetical deaths (without appropriate measures) would reach the lower six-digit range".

At the same time, around 850,000 post-Covid cases could be prevented, according to LGL.

This is “based on the scientific assumption (regarded without age differences, roughly estimated) that without suitable measures at least 70 percent of the population in Bavaria would have been infected with Corona and the post-Covid share is around 10 percent”.

It is interesting that Söder still uses the old, amazingly accurate number 130,000, most recently as a witness in the "Mask Investigation Committee" a week ago.

Accuracy gives the impression that someone has counted exactly here - and that counting can be done exactly at all.

However, the corona pandemic did not end just over a year ago.

The virus still exists and people are still dying not only from it, but from it.

Shouldn't Söder and LGL then add more lives saved to the 130,000?

Or is that not done because in Bavaria, like elsewhere, no more human lives are being saved by the state due to a lack of corona measures?

Or is Söder ultimately not concerned with the correctness of the numbers, but with their usefulness for political communication?

How does Söder come up with this amazingly exact number?

In any case, one can ask the question of the meaning of exact numbers – after all, they are subject to considerable uncertainties.

If “at least 70 percent” of the approximately 13 million inhabitants of Bavaria were infected, would there really be 130,000 deaths?

What does "at least 70 percent" mean?

Can that also mean 100 percent?

The FAZ consulted Viola Priesemann, a member of the Federal Government's Corona Expert Council.

What the physicist and head of a Max Planck research group says about the theory of complex systems at least raises doubts about the communicative translation of the LGL calculation.

"Let's look at the period before the vaccination until spring 2021," says Priesemann.

“The federal state has around 13 million inhabitants.

Before vaccination, the infection mortality rate was around one percent.

In this respect one can say: Yes, if everyone had been infected, there would have been around 130,000 deaths, or more due to a massive overload of the health system Spread not all become infected.

70 percent would be plausible, then it would be around 91.