Germany, where criticism is mounting against a vaccination campaign deemed too slow, extends and tightens its restrictions until at least January 31.
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Faced with a second wave much more deadly than the first, Germany will extend its restrictions and even tighten them. While a little more than 16,000 people died from Covid-19 across the Rhine in December, i.e. as many as between March and November, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Tuesday January 5 that nurseries, schools and non-essential shops would remain closed at least until January 31.
To these measures, in force since mid-December, two more will be added. The first is the limitation of travel to a radius of 15 kilometers around the home in the “districts” (Landkreise) where the incidence rate is greater than 200 per 100,000 inhabitants. Most are located in the east of the country, especially in Saxony and Thuringia, as well as in Bavaria, to the south. The second measure is the prohibition to receive at home more than one person outside his own home. Until then, the threshold was set at five people from two different households.
“We need to further reduce our social contact,” Ms. Merkel told the resulting from a videoconference lasting more than four hours with the minister-presidents of the country’s sixteen Länder. To justify this new hardening, the Chancellor notably cited the British “variant” of Covid-19, whose strong contagiousness requires being “particularly vigilant”, as well as “the tense situation” in which German hospitals currently find themselves. On Tuesday, the country’s intensive care wards welcomed just over 5,678 patients with Covid-19, twice as many as the peak of the first wave in April.
During its press conference, Ms Merkel also addressed the issue of vaccines, as more and more voices are raised in Germany to criticize the slowness with which the vaccination campaign has started : Since December 27, around 317,000 people have received a first dose of Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine in Germany.
The controversy has arisen within the government itself. On Monday, Vice-Chancellor and Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz, member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), sent a list of questions to his colleague in charge of health, the conservative Jens Spahn (CDU), among which: ” Why has the European Commission ordered so few vaccines? And why parts of the doses not claimed by the European Union were not ordered by Germany? “
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