(Fighting New Coronary Pneumonia) Germany’s epidemic prevention efforts are upgraded
China News Agency, Berlin, January 7 (Reporter Peng Dawei) As previously expected, the German Federal Government and the states on the 7th meeting on the epidemic prevention policy passed a resolution aimed at further escalation of the defense epidemic. Specific measures include that those who have not been vaccinated in the future must provide a negative report of the new crown test when they enter restaurants, cafes, bars and other places. In addition, officials have shortened the number of days of isolation for groups such as those who have been diagnosed with infection and those who have been close to each other.
On the evening of November 25, 2021, local time, people were shopping for decorations at the reopened Christmas Market at Gendarmenmarkt Square in Berlin, Germany.Photo by Kong Fang from China News Agency
The German disease control agency Robert Koch Institute announced on the 7th that the number of new diagnoses and the number of new deaths were 56,335 and 264 respectively. As of that day, a total of 74,179,95 people had been diagnosed and 113,632 had died. Among them, the country’s official “accumulated number of newly confirmed cases per 100,000 people in seven days” (incidence rate index) used to monitor the severity of the epidemic further rose to 303.4 on the same day. The number of patients requiring ICU intensive care treatment decreased by 67 compared with the previous day, to a total of 3378. As of that day, Germany had received 152.5 million doses of the new crown vaccine. A total of 59.6 million people have been fully vaccinated, accounting for 71.6% of the country’s total population; 34.6 million people have been vaccinated, accounting for 41.6% of the total population.
The two things that received the most attention from the day’s resolution were the so-called “2G plus” regulation and the new regulation to shorten the length of isolation. The previous rule requires that throughout Germany (with the exception of Saxony-Anhalt), when entering restaurants, cafes, bars and other places, people must show proof that they have been vaccinated or that the day’s new crown test is negative.
In terms of the isolation policy, those who have been vaccinated with the booster injection will be exempt from isolation if they become close contacts of the confirmed patients in the future. The quarantine days for the remaining confirmed patients and close contacts are uniformly reduced to 10 days; if the nucleic acid test is negative on the seventh day, it can be further reduced to 7 days. Medical staff must be quarantined for seven days after being diagnosed, and must be asymptomatic for at least 48 hours and nucleic acid negative before they can end the quarantine early.
In response to the above-mentioned resolution, Christian Karajanides, a member of the German Federal Government’s Epidemic Prevention Policy Expert Committee, said that shortening the quarantine period can avoid personnel shortages in key institutions and is a good compromise. But he also warned that the Omi Keron mutant strain makes the trend of the epidemic extremely uncertain. With the surge in the number of newly confirmed cases, Germany may once again face an overload of the medical system. To this end, he once again called for speeding up the progress of the vaccination booster shot. (Finish)
Editor in charge: Huang Yang
.