Corona-News: 14 out of 16 federal states are making final exams easier for students

News about Corona from March 4th, 2023

Corona special rules: 14 out of 16 federal states make final exams easier for students

Saturday, March 04, 2023, 00:25: At 14 out of 16 German federal states are making the examination modalities easier for pupils for the final exams due in April at secondary schools, junior high schools, comprehensive schools and vocational schools as well as grammar schools. This was the result of a survey by the editorial network Germany (RND/Saturday) in all culture ministries and state governments. The only exceptions so far are Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate.

Accordingly, Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein have decided to grant 30 minutes additional time for written exams.

As in previous years, Bavaria restricts the content of the written exams, but does not grant any additional time. In North Rhine-Westphalia, only the mathematics exams will be adjusted by an extended selection of tasks and an additional time of 30 minutes. When asked by the RND, Lower Saxony also announced that they wanted to use the leeway agreed by the Conference of Ministers of Education and were still working on the details.

Baden-Württemberg, Saxony, Hamburg, Saarland and Thuringia will carry out the tests again with similar simplifications as in 2021 and 2022. In the Hessian Ministry of Culture, no final decision has yet been made as to whether the exams should also be adjusted this year, a spokesman told the RND.

Rhineland-Palatinate, on the other hand, has already decided to carry out the exams as before the pandemic, the Ministry of Education informed the RND: “This year’s high school graduates were able to be taught in person as far as possible in the qualification phase for the Abitur. For these reasons, we have decided not to further simplify the Abitur examination this school year.” In addition, the federal state is the only one in which the examinations have already started.

According to a decision by the Conference of Ministers of Education, the state governments have the opportunity this year for the last time to ease the scope and duration of examinations in order to compensate for the loss of lessons during the corona pandemic. The federal states had the option of offering a larger selection of examination tasks, narrowing down examination topics in advance and/or giving up to 30 minutes additional examination time. It is up to the federal states to decide whether and which of the options to use.

After carnival, Cologne assumes a high number of unreported cases of corona incidence

Friday, March 03, 2023 at 06:37 a.mr: According to a media report, Cologne assumes an incidence that exceeds the officially measured value many times over. “The viral load in the wastewater was already increasing before the carnival, this trend continued during the street carnival and the week after,” the “Rheinische Post” (Friday) quoted a spokeswoman for the city of Cologne as saying. “The health department assumes that the incidence is now ten times higher than the officially measured value.”

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported in its weekly report on Thursday evening that the corona incidence values ​​had increased in regions “with stronger carnival activities”. Accordingly, the nationwide increase in incidence continued last week at a low level: it was estimated at 14 percent compared to the week before. According to the report, however, the values ​​rose particularly sharply in Rhineland-Palatinate (36 percent), North Rhine-Westphalia (35 percent) and Saarland (34 percent) as well as in the 20 to 29 age group. However, this information only relates to laboratory-confirmed corona cases.

Based on its data for Thursday, the RKI reported a value of 385.3 new corona infections per 100,000 inhabitants within seven days for Cologne.

After the corona pandemic: fewer staff in health authorities

Thursday, March 02, 2023 at 06:32: After the corona pandemic subsided, the health authorities in Thuringia employed significantly fewer people than at the height of the crisis. At that time, additional staff was sent to the municipal offices, primarily to track contacts. “The staff supplied has been reduced to 100 percent,” said a spokeswoman for the Weimar city administration of the German Press Agency. In particular, the employees of external service providers, freelancers and the so-called RKI scouts are no longer employed in the city’s health department.

Some of the employees who were once additional have now successfully applied for other positions in the municipal administrations and would now work there, according to reports from Weimar, the district of Nordhausen and Erfurt. In the Thuringian state capital, this affects four workers, said a spokeswoman for the city administration. “They now work as permanent employees in the health department and in the social welfare office.”

During the peak phase of the corona pandemic, the municipal health authorities were reinforced with additional staff. This should ensure that they can trace as many chains of infection as possible and thus prevent subsequent infections. In addition to Bundeswehr soldiers, for example, people who were wanted by the Federal Office of Administration on behalf of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) were also hired. They had helped the health authorities to identify contact persons for those who had tested positive. Employees from other municipal areas were also temporarily sent there.

The example of the Jena city administration makes it clear how many additional employees strengthened the health departments at the time: According to the information, 30 employees worked in the local health department before the pandemic. During the peak phase of the pandemic, around 60 women and men worked there – plus other staff who, among other things, issued quarantine certificates. The Jena health department currently has 45 employees.

The situation in the Nordhausen district office was similar. “To ensure contact tracing during the corona pandemic, up to 20 additional temporary employees were temporarily employed,” said a spokeswoman. In addition, employees from other areas of administration had come.

According to the administration, there are no staff cuts in the health authorities after the pandemic terminations been pronounced. “There were no layoffs,” said a spokeswoman for the Gera city administration. Rather, fixed-term contracts were not extended and employees from other parts of the administration returned to their former jobs.

Although Corona is no longer a huge challenge for employees in the health authorities, several administrations have said that the workload there is still high. Among other things, they are now intensively involved in examining mostly Ukrainian refugees for tuberculosis, according to Weimar. In addition, there are a large number of official medical examinations that have been postponed during the pandemic.

After the corona pandemic: correspondents complain about worsening working conditions in China

05.07: Working conditions for foreign journalists in China have continued to deteriorate. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic three years ago, “press freedom has been declining at an accelerating rate across the country,” China’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCCC) noted Wednesday after an annual survey of its members. All 102 journalists who took part in the survey felt that the working conditions “do not meet international standards”.

Almost a third reported incidents where trips or interviews had to be canceled due to official pressure. 14 percent even complained that they had been treated roughly or violently (previous year: 12 percent). Just over a third (38 percent) reported that at least one of their sources had been harassed, arrested, asked for questioning, or had other negative consequences for interacting with foreign journalists.

The Correspondents’ Club spoke of “another difficult and exhausting year”. The controls of the strict zero-Covid policy, which was only abandoned in December, were also used to curtail the reporting of correspondents.

FBI: Coronavirus origin ‘most likely’ from lab glitch

Wednesday, March 1, 2:43 a.m.: The director of the US federal police FBI has confirmed an earlier assessment by his agency that a possible laboratory glitch in China was “most likely” responsible for the spread of the corona virus. “The FBI has long assumed that the origin of the pandemic is most likely a possible laboratory incident in Wuhan,” Christopher Wray said in an interview with US broadcaster Fox News published on Tuesday evening (local time). “This is about a possible leak at a Chinese government-controlled laboratory.”

Wray added that investigations are ongoing and many details are yet to be revealed. However, he wanted to note that the Chinese government had “done its best” to “hinder and cover up” the work of the US government and foreign partners. This is unfortunate for everyone.

The communications director of the National Security Council, John Kirby, made it clear on Monday that there was still no unified view within the US government on the origin of the corona virus. “There is currently no consensus in the US government as to how exactly Covid came about,” he said.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the US Department of Energy has changed its assessment of the origin of the corona virus and is now assuming a possible laboratory failure – but only with a “low” degree of certainty. China had rejected this. Beijing’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the search for the origin of the virus is a scientific matter and should “not be politicized”.

Almost every second Corona-Dead from nursing facility

06:22: According to a recent report, almost every second corona death in Germany previously lived in a care facility. This emerges from the care report of the Barmer health insurance company, which is available to the “Rheinische Post” (Tuesday). Based on the years 2020 and 2021, the total proportion of those who died with Covid-19 is 45 percent.

At the same time, the report shows major regional differences. While in December 2021 – at the peak of the second corona wave – in Bremen (0.57 percent) and Schleswig-Holstein (1.27 percent) only a very small proportion of the residents were ill, this proportion in Thuringia (9 .73 percent) and Saxony (10.3 percent) were significantly higher. “Countries with a lower acceptance of the corona measures also had higher proportions of Covid in the population,” the authors write, according to the newspaper report.

The pandemic also left its mark on the nursing staff. According to the Barmer study, almost 70 percent say that they are often physically exhausted, compared to 43 percent before the pandemic. The number of nurses who can no longer sleep through the night has risen from 29 percent to 43 percent. In addition, 43 percent have considered giving up their job. Before the pandemic, it was almost 20 percent, according to the report.

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