Border controls – including restrictions on public transport and mandatory testing and quarantine requirements for travelers – are inevitable to prevent the import of other more contagious variants of coronavirus, German Health Minister Jens Spahn said Friday.
“This means there is one prohibition of transport – and with no exceptions, tests must be conducted before entering Germany – and there is a quarantine obligation, ” Spahn told journalists at a health news conference.
Spahn went on to say that – despite the new variants – the total number of infections in Germany decreased.
To protect the population from virus mutations – that’s why the federal government decided yesterday to do that Declare the Czech Republic, Tyrol and Slovakia as coronavirus variant areas,said the minister.
Some context: On Thursday, German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Germany is temporarily imposing border controls and restricting travel from the Czech Republic and the Austrian province of Tyrol due to a spike in infections from the new, more contagious variants of the coronavirus. The restrictions take effect on Sunday.
On Friday, Germany took up 9,860 new coronavirus infections – a decrease of 3,048 cases compared to the same day last weekThe number of deaths from coronavirus in Germany in the past 24 hours was 556 – a decrease of 299 compared to Friday last week.
The latest data from the country’s public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), indicates that the number of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants could drop below 60 this weekend, Spahn said.
Starting Friday There are 5.7 million coronavirus vaccines spread across Germany’s 16 states, with about 3.6 million vaccinations so far. 2,490,423 – 3% of the German population received the first shot, while 1,178,725 received the second shot, according to data from RKI. Spahn said Germany will distribute 8 million coronavirus vaccines by the end of next week.
Germany currently manages the coronavirus vaccines developed by Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca.