Germany
The situation seems less worrying among our eastern neighbors: the weekly average is 207 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. But the government is not convinced. The health minister thinks the figures are incomplete because the test centers and labs will not be operating at full capacity over the Christmas holidays.
“According to Minister Lauterbach, the actual number of infections could be up to three times higher than it seems. And despite this, there is no lockdown in Germany either,” says correspondent Wouter Zwart. “The new government is also very keen not to let the lockdown return.”
Instead, the country has a strict 2G policy. “Unvaccinated people are only allowed to travel by public transport, to the supermarket and to work. They have nowhere else to go in. The rest of the population, on the other hand, can live almost normally: to the market, the optician, the cinema. Meetings of large groups remain limited, but less strict than in the Netherlands.”
What the Germans are stricter about is quarantining people infected with the omikron variant. If you are infected with the delta variant, you have to isolate yourself for ten days. If you have been vaccinated, you can leave quarantine after a week with a negative test.
But if you have omikron, you have to quarantine for fourteen days, as well as people with whom you have been in contact. Omikron makes no exception for vaccinated people.
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