Germany calls on its young to be the Covid heroes of 2020 — by staying on their sofa

'We did the only thing we could… absolutely nothing'

Coronavirus Article Bar with counter

The German government has deployed a tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign, calling on young people to “be heroes” during the pandemic — by vegetating on their sofas.

In one of the videos, an elderly man looks back on the year 2020, when, as a 22-year-old student, he was called into action in the city of Chemnitz.

“At that age you want to go out partying, study or get to know new people,” he says, accompanied by dramatic background music. “But fate had other plans. An invisible danger threatened everything we believed in.”

Just as the pathos becomes almost unbearable, the man says “we did the only thing we could… absolutely nothing.” The video then cuts to a student slouching on a sofa. “We were as lazy as skunks,” he recalls, explaining that "our sofa was the front and our patience was our weapon."

“That’s how we became heroes in the corona winter of 2020.”

Great message. I subtitled it in English as this is a universal message. pic.twitter.com/5inar0NoQd

— Axel Antoni (@antoni_UK) November 14, 2020

The video campaign, released by Angela Merkel’s government over the weekend, has already been viewed tens of thousands of times across social media sites.

One user on YouTube commented that he had "spent his whole life training for this moment."

Young people are believed to have been responsible for increased infections during the early autumn, with PCR testing picking up more positive cases among the young than the old.

In October higher numbers of elderly people started to test positive for the virus, leading to a sharp increase in hospitalizations that Germany is still trying to keep under control.

Germany now has more Covid-19 patients in its intensive care wards than in the spring and is seeing around 20,000 new cases per day.

The country went into a month-long lockdown at the start of November. Ms Merkel is set to meet the heads of the federal states on Monday for “half-time” talks which will review the current shutdown of the gastronomy and tourism industries. Several leading members of her CDU party have said that no relaxation of the rules is on the agenda.