Germany’s leading public health body, the Robert Koch Institute, has warned against further loosening restrictions introduced to slow down the spread of coronavirus, writes Kate Connolly, the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent.
Lars Schaade, its vice president, said at the RKI’s twice-weekly briefing the situation was too fragile to allow more relaxation, after small shops were allowed to reopen this week and some pupils returned to school, following a month of strict lockdown measures.
Schaade said only if the confirmed cases fell to a few hundred, should Germany consider further relaxation. Currently there are typically more than 2,000 new infections every day.
According to the RKI, Germany has 150,383 confirmed cases, a rise of 2,337 from Thursday, and 5,321 people have died from the virus.
But due to a delay in the central collation of figures, the real number of cases is said by reliable health watchers gathering statistics on the Länder level, to be more than 3,000 higher, and the number of deaths just under 300 more than the RKI’s figures.
The current reproduction rate in Germany is 0.9 – which means every person with the infection is passing it on to one other person. This is up from 0.7 a week ago, but virologists consider one and under to be good.
Schaade said keeping the restrictions was necessary because in order to be able to keep the disease under control, health authorities around the country have to be in a position to be able to identify each case and trace their contacts, to place them in immediate isolation. If the number of new infections grows too quickly, the tracking and tracing process becomes too unwieldy a task, and the situation could quickly get out of control, he said.
He said unlike in Italy, France and Spain, there was so far no evidence of excess mortality in Germany – that is, a death rate higher than the usual average death rate for this time of year. This was, he said, due to the fact that Germany was able to tackle the illness early on, largely through testing, and dampen its spread, and therefore treated many coronavirus cases effectively, without lessening hospitals’ ability to treat other illnesses.
Referring to the pressure being placed on authorities to relax measures, which he advised against strongly, Schaade said:
It is a paradox, that due to the success of the measures that have been taken … these very measures are now being called into question.
That Germany has come through this epidemic comparatively well so far, is thanks to the measures we have taken. The number of cases has stayed at a level with which the health system has been able to cope, and it must stay that way. We cannot afford to become lax. With respect to the first relaxation of measures, this must not be allowed to lead to a landslide of other subsequent easing that could have serious consequences.”
He said quite simply, that more contact would automatically lead to more infections “and when there are more infections a dynamic will develop again very quickly with rising infection rates which in the worst case, could bring us to a point where the epidemic is no longer manageable.
In short, Schaade said, his “emphatic plea” was for people to stick to the recommendations:
Stay at home, stay away from others, keep the 1.5 metre – or even better 2 metre distance, keep to the coughing and sneezing rules, and on public transport or shops, wear mouth-nose cover to protect others.
He recognised, he said, that “many people are running out of strength, and many are suffering from existential angst. Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to tell you it’s over…but unfortunately it’s not over.”
