The number of new infections is decreasing, but many people are still dying. Corona is becoming a permanent condition, as is the debate on measures.
And now – mask yes or no? Photo: Peter Kneffel/dpa
First the good news. This week they were so few corona infections as not registered for more than a year. This is doubly good. Because in the first two years of the pandemic, the November curves always pointed upwards, which led to nearly 6,000 deaths in the Christmas week two years ago. Fortunately we are far from such extreme values in this Advent. A new variant of the worst corona cannot be ruled out, but it is currently not even in sight.
Are the four federal states that recently suspended the isolation obligation right? Isn’t it too late to lift the mask obligation in local transport, as Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein are proposing? Well, unfortunately it’s not that simple.
Because the bad news is that today’s numbers are not directly comparable to those of the first two years of the pandemic. Since far fewer tests will be done this fall, fewer infections will also be found. The number of unreported cases is growing. Unfortunately, the pandemic isn’t going away just because you don’t look so closely anymore. The update becomes an unpleasant consistency week after week about 1,000 more deaths from corona counted by the Robert Koch Institute.
So is Health Minister Karl Lauterbach right, who never tires of warning that the numbers will soon increase again? But how does that fit with Christian Drosten? The virologist of the Charité of Berlin has just arrived one time-Interview spoke about the end of the pandemic. If not even the most popular representatives of the science team line up, who should you follow?
Indeed, Lauterbach and Drosten are not far apart. The virologist predicts increasing numbers even in winter. He just looks ahead, sees the ups and downs faster than the waves as a sign that Corona is becoming endemic.
The crown wave peaks are not that high anymore. But the valleys aren’t that deep anymore. In a Corona endemic it has not disappeared. It will just be normal. A permanent state. It doesn’t have to be a drama. Mainly thanks to vaccinations, a high degree of immunity has been achieved in Germany, which protects a large part of the population from serious illness or even death.
But what about Long Covid? How about protecting the most vulnerable and the risk of a super variant emerging from less vaccinated parts of the world? At the end of the third year of the pandemic, we are still faced with many unknowns. Only one thing is clear right now: the dispute over policy responses to the pandemic remains necessary.
