Germany has too many loopholes to shut down the coronavirus, the head of the country’s disease control agency said, while figures published Thursday showed the highest number of daily deaths since the start of the pandemic.
The Robert Koch Institute said 1,244 deaths from COVID-19 were confirmed within one day to Thursday, bringing the total number to 43,881. There were also 25,164 newly confirmed cases, bringing the total number of known infections in Germany to nearly 2 million.
Lothar Wieler, president of the institute, said data indicates that people in Germany travel more than during the first phase of the spring pandemic, contributing to the spread of the virus.
German authorities have imposed restrictions on socializing, largely closed schools and limited travel for people in areas with high infection rates, but the rules are not uniformly enforced in the country’s 16 states.
“For me, these measures that we are taking now are not a complete lockdown,” said Wieler. “There are still too many exceptions and they are not strictly implemented.”
Officials are considering tougher restrictions to curb the ongoing rise in infections.
The 7-day moving average of daily new cases has increased over the past two weeks from 23.36 per 100,000 people on December 30 to 26.03 per 100,000 people on January 13.
Wieler pointed out the sharp spike in infections recently seen in Ireland as an example of how quickly the outbreak could escalate again if the rules are relaxed, especially given the new seemingly more contagious variant of the virus that appears there and in neighboring Greater Britain is circulating.
All the infections with the variants confirmed in Germany so far involved people who had traveled outside the country, Wieler said.
“We have to be very careful, especially with the British mutation of this virus,” Ralph Brinkhaus, the parliamentary leader of Merkel’s bloc, told broadcaster n-tv. “So we don’t know yet what further measures are needed in the coming weeks.”
To ease the pressure on working families having to care for school-aged children and discourage them from using emergency care, parliament passed a bill on Thursday that doubles the amount of paid parental leave to 40 days by 2021. 112.88 euros ($ 137) per day for parents if they stay at home to care for children under 12 who were unable to attend school due to the pandemic.
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