The lifting of restrictions on contacts between people will be postponed for a week.
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DOnly days after the announcement of a gradual return to normal in Germany, one canton had to reintroduce containment on Friday and two others are considering it in the face of an increase in the number of infections.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, a major Covid-19 outbreak occurred in Coesfeld in a meat processing plant, in which more than 100 of the 1,200 employees were infected. These facilities have been temporarily closed, said the Minister of Health of this land (regional state), Karl-Josef Laumann.
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More broadly, it was decided that the lifting of restrictions on contacts between people, as well as the opening of restaurants and amusement parks would be postponed for a week, until May 18, in this canton. Schools and nurseries are not affected by this measure.
“Not put the whole canton in quarantine”
In Schleswig-Holstein, a border region with Denmark, a slaughterhouse in the canton of Segeberg has registered 109 cases of contamination, which casts suspicion on the whole industry in Germany. In the eastern part of Thuringia, in the canton of Greiz, which has nearly 100,000 inhabitants, several homes for the aged have experienced an outbreak of contamination.
The region’s government plans to make a decision next week on the planned process to ease home support measures. “To be clear: we are not going to quarantine the whole canton,” said its leader Martina Schweinsburg, but two small towns particularly affected could be affected.
Germany decided on a partial return to normal on Wednesday. But faced with the risk of a second wave, deemed “certain” by virologists, Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German regions agreed on Wednesday on a reconfiguration mechanism at local level if the number of contaminations by the new coronavirus returned to the rise
“A long way to go”
This is done by canton, city, or even by establishment when it is a retirement home or a residential building, and no longer as so far generally for a region or the country as a whole. whole.
The trigger for this reconfiguration has been set at 50 infections on average per 100,000 inhabitants over a period of seven days per zone. This figure was recently close to 90 in the township of Greiz and 52.7 in that of Coesfeld, according to the Robert Koch Institute of Public Health (RKI).
“We must always be aware that we are still at the beginning of the pandemic and that we still have a long way to go to fight the virus,” Merkel warned on Wednesday.
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