German Chancellor Angela Merkel wears a protective face mask as she leaves after speaking to the media for her annual summer press conference during the coronavirus pandemic on August 28, 2020 in Berlin, Germany.
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Chancellor Angela Merkel will announce that Germany will extend its lockdown until March 14 due to concerns about new forms of the coronavirus.
Early Wednesday, a draft document emerged early Wednesday outlining plans between Merkel and government officials to enforce the lockdown and urge citizens to enforce social distance rules, but gradually lift some restrictions over the next few weeks.
Reopening schools is a priority for German leaders, although the country’s federal system means that individual states should be able to decide how to do this. The reopening of shops and hotels could begin next month in areas where the infection rate is also low. The restrictions were due to expire on February 14.
There are concerns in Germany about the spread of more contagious variants of the virus, particularly the mutation first discovered in the UK last fall. Yet the daily number of new infections in Germany is declining as public life across the country is constantly being blocked.
The public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute, reported 8,072 new cases of coronavirus and 813 deaths on Wednesday, bringing the total number of infections to about 2.3 million so far and the death toll to 62,969.
Earlier Wednesday, a German legislator reportedly described the situation as “very fragile”.
Slow rollout of the EU
The slow roll-out of coronavirus vaccines in Germany, but also in the rest of the EU, is a nightmare for the German government, which is an important pillar in the bloc. The EU was slower than the UK and US to order vaccines from major drug manufacturers and faced a shortage of supply.
The longer the vaccination roll-out takes, the longer the economic damage from lockdowns is expected to be. The German economy contracted by 5% in 2020, according to full-year GDP (gross domestic product) data released in January.
Ludovic Subran, chief economist at Allianz, told CNBC on Wednesday that the slow roll-out of vaccinations could significantly hurt the EU’s growth prospects in 2021.
“I’m getting a little nervous, and we’re not until February, that we’re missing the boat here, that vaccination is the best investment out there and we have to put all our strength (efforts) there,” he said. CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe.”
“ Our forecasts show that Europe won’t go back to pre-crisis levels (growth) until 2022, and that’s when we saw the vaccination chaos and started thinking, ‘Okay, we’re really jeopardizing the recovery here.’ The problem is we are vaccinating four times slower here than in the UK and US, “he said, adding:” This is a really big problem as this is going to make or break the 2021 GDP recovery for Europe. “
—CNBC’s Annette Weisbach contributed to this article.