The Chancellor’s warning was impressive. “We mustn’t weigh ourselves a second in safety,” Angela Merkel explained on Monday. In Germany, the first easing came into force after weeks of restrictions in the corona crisis. “It would be a shame if we had a relapse of sight,” said Merkel.
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The country is currently trying to cautiously return to normal. It is clear that if the number of infections rises sharply again, a new shutdown would be inevitable. “If we all continue to pretend that the problem has been overcome, we will have an outbreak again. That’s pretty certain,” said Lars Schaade, Vice President of the Robert Koch Institute, on Tuesday. If the number of cases increases massively in the future, “the health system can still be overloaded very quickly” (more on bed capacity read here).
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It is not yet clear whether, when and how strongly a second corona wave will occur. Many aspects play a role here, for example the question of whether there will be a weakening of the infection process due to higher temperatures in the summer months. It is tricky that you may only see the wave when it is already there. This has to do with the fact that new cases only appear in the statistics after over a week or even longer due to the incubation period and the delay in reporting.
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The virologist Christian Drosten from the Charité in Berlin has recently describedwhy a second wave could be significantly more problematic than the first. At the start of the pandemic in Germany, the cases were very unevenly distributed. Areas severely affected, in which the pathogen is affected by Carnival sessions, Strong beer festivals or returning ski vacationers had spread above average, so far contrasted many parts of the country where the problem was far from being so massive.
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If the infections flare up again, according to Drosten, this should change – because the pathogen is currently spreading under the blanket of the current restrictions, just slowly. “Suddenly you have a wave of infection within a month that you didn’t expect,” said the virologist. Even if the reproductive factor had been kept around 1 by then (this means that one person with Covid 19 infects one healthy person at a time), the consequences could be drastic.
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