BERLIN (AP) — Germany has entered a “nationwide state of emergency” because of surging coronavirus infections, the head of the country’s disease control agency said Friday.
Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, said regular medical care cannot be guaranteed anymore in some parts of the country because hospitals and intensive care wards are overstretched.
The German air force confirmed a report by daily Bild that it was preparing to help transfer patients to clinics with free beds.
“All of Germany is one big outbreak,” Wieler told reporters in Berlin. “This is a nationwide state of emergency. We need to pull the emergency brake.”
He called for urgent additional measures to tackle the rise in COVID-19 cases, which topped 50,000 for the third day running. The Robert Koch Institute also reported 201 further deaths, taking the toll to 98,739 since the start of the outbreak.
Wieler’s comments came as the upper house of parliament on Friday approved new measures to control the outbreak proposed by the center-left alliance that emerged after the Sept. 26 national election. The measures, which come into force Wednesday, include requirements for people to prove they are vaccinated, recently recovered from COVID-19 or have tested negative for the virus in order to access shared workplaces or public transport. Employees will also have to work from home, whenever possible.
Separately, outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed with the governors of Germany’s 16 states to introduce a new threshold linked to the number of hospital admissions of COVID-19 patients per 100,000 people over a seven-day period. Some states are also considering mandatory vaccinations for some professional groups such as medical staff and nursing home employees.
Neighboring Austria, which has also been hit by a surge in new cases, announced it would extend a nationwide lockdown to vaccinated people from Monday, and introduce compulsory vaccinations from February.
Such measures are not currently being discussed in Germany, where the outgoing Merkel government and the three-party alliance hoping to replace it are at odds over how to respond to the pandemic.
Germany’s current health minister, Jens Spahn, called Friday for a “national common effort” to respond to the rising case numbers.
“In the short term we won’t manage to break the wave (of infections) with vaccinations and booster shots alone,” he said at a joint news conference with Wieler, who called on Germans to help limit the spread of the virus by reducing their social contacts.
The southern state of Bavaria announced Friday that it is cancelling all Christmas markets this year, and closing bars and clubs for three weeks.
Bavarian governor Markus Soeder said regions with more than 1,000 new weekly cases per 100,000 inhabitants would face even tougher restrictions, including the closure of all restaurants, sports and cultural venues.
___
Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
© 2021 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
—-
This content is published through a licensing agreement with Acquire Media using its NewsEdge technology.
Hey, America is too just ask the weasel phony tony. And don’t forget to do exactly as he orders. Don’t go to work, listen entirely to him, vote democrat, believe his unproven rhetoric, get vaccinated and above all do not question his intelligence.
Someone needs to actually put together a study using useful data to determine the whys and hows of Covid 19. Some people get it (sometimes more than once), some people are impacted no worse than a 2 day cold, some people have weird medical problems that really have no obvious connection to respiratory viruses, some people are exposed (with and without vaccine) and get nothing at all, some people have horrible complications (with and without underlying medical problems), and some people wind up on vents and die.
We don’t know why some people seem to be immune and others are extremely susceptible to Covid (even with vaccines). It seems that treatment regimens are becoming more and more effective, and fewer and fewer people are winding up on a ventilator in a hospital, but there is still controversy over what medications should be used (so who is right and who is wrong). With all these things we don’t know (or haven’t been made aware of for political reasons) , how can the government (s) be so committed to action that essentially destroys their economies, personal freedom and pose serious threats to their social fabric and culture?
Simply put, why can’t we have reliable information supported by legitimate data from sources that do not have a political or financial stake in shading the facts and conclusions?
What in the hell did we use for news before COVID? Can we go back to it?
Maybe they need to call in Donald Sutherland.. I am sure he can ‘operation’, clean sweep the problem up, quick and fast.. Outbreak style!
OK. Masks don’t work. They never did. Lock downs don’t work (except to destroy peoples livelihoods) as unlike small pox (which by the way had no asymptomatic carriers) this virus does not need a human host to survive. The combination of mask mandates and lockdowns don’t work as one just needs to look at the numbers from the blue states which did that and the red states that didn’t to understand this. And last but not least, the experimental shots don’t work since now even Fauci and the brainwashed zombies who listen to him and people like him admit that even with the shot you can still get and spread the virus. ( This is because the shots do not provide what is known as sterilizing immunity). So all that being said what Germany, Austria, Austrailia, and most countries including the U.S.are doing amounts to nothing more than doubling down on stupid. Oh, and while they are at it lets vaccinate children, an act which is the very definition. Call me pessimistic but this may not end well…
ADD to that many of the TESTS for covid, also don’t work, as they keep giving either TOO MANY FALSE POSITIVES< or false negatives….
and still nobody cares about the chicoms who released it on the world.
PLENTY care, but those who have the POWER to do something about it, are too SCARED to even try anything.