ROSTOCK, Germany — It was barely noon, but Steffen Bockhahn’s phone had not stopped ringing with people wanting to know if they qualified for a vaccination, and if not now, when?
Days earlier Germany had changed its guidance on who qualified for vaccines, resulting in a seemingly endless stream of questions from worried local residents for Mr. Bockhahn, the health minister for this port city in Germany’s northeast.
“No, I’m sorry, but we are not allowed to vaccinate anyone in Category 2 yet, only those nurses or other care givers are who are in the first priority group,” he told a caller. “You have to wait.”
More than two months into the country’s second full lockdown, people across Germany are growing tired of waiting, whether for vaccines, getting their government compensation, or a return to normalcy. It’s a disheartening comedown.
At the start of the pandemic, Germany showed itself to be a global leader in dealing with a once-in-a-century public heath crisis. Chancellor Angela Merkel forged a consensus on a lockdown. Her government’s testing and tracing tools were the envy of European neighbors. The country’s death and infection rates were among the lowest in the European Union. And a generally trustful population abided by restrictions with relatively muted grumbling.
No more. In the virus’s second wave, Germany now finds itself swamped like everyone else. A host of tougher new restrictions has stretched on, amid loud complaints, and even occasional protests before everything was shut down again. Still, infection rates hover around 10,000 new cases per day.
And as fears grow over the new variants first identified in England and South Africa, Germany’s vaccination program, lashed to the fortunes of the European Union, has floundered. Only 3.5 percent of Germans have received their first shots, and just 2 percent, roughly, have been fully immunized.
A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that while more Germans feel confident in their country’s handling of the pandemic than Americans or Britons, their approval dropped 11 percentage points between June and December 2020.
The mood has only soured further as Germans watch other countries, especially Britain, step up their vaccination campaigns with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — developed with the help of German taxpayers — while they have been left waiting for doses to arrive.
Beyond that, mayors are warning of the death of inner cities if small stores are not allowed to reopen. Some states have reopened schools, while others remain shuttered. Doctors are warning of the lockdown’s lasting psychological damage to children.
Parents are frustrated with the lack of support for online learning. Germany’s stringent data protection laws prevent Germans from using U.S.-based digital learning platforms, but local solutions do not always function smoothly. In many public schools, education now consists of teachers sending lessons as email attachments for students to work through on their own.
Ms. Merkel has done her best to buck up a weary public. Over the past month, the normally reserved chancellor has chatted by video with overwhelmed families, appeared before the Berlin news corps and given two interviews on prime time television.
“I wish that I had something good to announce,” she said, addressing the nation.
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