Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to announce that Germany will extend its closure until March 14 amid concerns about new coronavirus infections.
A draft document appeared Wednesday morning outlining plans between Merkel and state officials to maintain the ban and urged citizens to adhere to the rules of social distancing, but to gradually lift some restrictions in the coming weeks.
Cases In Germany
The reopening of schools is a key issue for the German leadership, although the national plan states that individual states are expected to 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 very low. The restrictions were due to expire on February 14.
There are concerns in Germany about the spread of viral infections, especially the first mutations found in the UK last fall. However the daily number of new German infections has been declining amidst the ongoing closure of public health across the country.
The public health organization, the Robert Koch Institute, reported 8,072 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday and 813 deaths, bringing the total number of infected people to 2.3 million, and the death toll to 62,969.
Earlier on Wednesday, a German legislature reportedly described the situation as “extremely fragile.”
Speaking to German media out Spiegel Online, Winfried Kretschmann, Prime Minister of the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, said there were concerns in Germany that the rate of infection could rise, as seen in other countries where diversity has helped disease rates to rise.
“We can see in other countries, such as Portugal, how quickly the tide can turn,” Kretschmann said, Reuters reported. Germany has recently sent medics to help in Portuguese hospitals that have been overwhelmed by an influx of patients following a rise in Covid infections.
Vaccine Roll-Out In The EU
The slow release of coronavirus vaccines in Germany, as well as the rest of the EU, is a hindrance to the German government, which is a key pillar of the organization. The EU was slower than the U.K. and U.S. to order vaccines from key drugmakers and has faced supply shortages.
The longer vaccination rollouts take, the more prolonged the economic damage of lockdowns are expected to be. Germany’s economy contracted by 5% in 2020, according to full-year GDP (gross domestic product) data released in January.
Ludovic Subran, a senior economist at Allianz, told CNBC on Wednesday that a slow release of the vaccine could seriously undermine the EU’s broader growth prospects by 2021.
“I’m getting a bit nervous, and we’re only in February, that we’re missing the boat here, that the vaccination is the best investment there is and we should put all our forces (efforts) there,” he told CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe.”
“Our forecasts show that Europe will only go back to pre-crisis (growth) levels by 2022, and then we saw the vaccination chaos and we started to think ‘OK, are we really jeopardizing the recovery here’ … the problem is we’re vaccinating four times slower than the U.K. and U.S. here,” he said, adding: “This is really a big issue, because this is going to make or break the GDP recovery of 2021 for Europe.”
