Germany has too many gaps in its rules to block the coronavirus, the head of the country’s disease control agency said, while figures released on Thursday show the highest number of daily deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.
The Robert Koch Institute said 1,244 deaths from COVID-19 were confirmed in a day to Thursday, bringing the total to 43,881. There have also been 25,164 recently confirmed cases, bringing Germany’s known infections to close to 2 million.
Lothar Wieler, the institute’s president, said the data indicated that people in Germany were traveling more than in the first phase of the spring pandemic, helping to spread the virus.
The German authorities have imposed restrictions on social contacts, mostly closed schools and limited travel for those in areas with high infection rates, but the rules are not applied uniformly in the country’s 16 states.
“For me, these measures that we are taking now are not a complete deadlock,” Wieler said. “There are still too many exceptions and they are not strictly implemented.”
Officials are considering tougher restrictions to reduce the continued rise in infections.
The 7-day average of new daily cases has risen in the past two weeks from 23.36 to 100,000 on December 30 to 26.03 to 100,000 on January 13.
Wieler pointed to the sudden rise in infections recently seen in Ireland, as an example of how quickly the outbreak can grow again if the rules are relaxed, especially given the new, seemingly more contagious variant of the virus circulating there and in neighboring Britain.
All infections with confirmed variants so far in Germany have involved people who have traveled abroad, Wieler said.
“We need to be very careful, especially about the British mutation of this virus,” Ralph Brinkhaus, the parliamentary leader of the Merkel bloc, told n-tv. “So we don’t know yet what additional measures will be needed in the coming weeks.”
To ease the pressure on working families who have to look after school-age children and discourage them from using emergency care facilities, parliament on Thursday passed a bill doubling the amount of paid 40-day paid parental leave for 2021. Public health insurance will pay up to 112.88 euros ($ 137) a day to parents if they stay home to care for children under 12 who have not been able to go to school due to the pandemic.
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