BERLIN (AP) – The German government decided on Thursday to temporarily reinstate border controls along its southeastern border, after designating the Czech Republic and parts of Austria as “mutation zones” due to the large number of case variants. coronavirus, the German news agency dpa reported.
Temporary border controls and certain entry restrictions will begin at midnight on Sunday, dpa reported.
Travelers coming from certain areas of Austria or the Czech Republic will have to provide proof of a negative coronavirus test to enter Germany, a requirement that will be an obstacle for thousands of cross-border workers.
It was not clear how long the border controls would last.
Bavarian Governor Markus Soeder, whose state borders both Austria and the Czech Republic, said earlier on Thursday that if the federal government designates the Czech Republic and the Tyrolean region of Austria as mutation zones, Bavaria will ask permission to pick up border posts where passengers who do not take a negative COVID-19 test would be rejected.
Soeder said that all but one of Bavaria’s regions with high rates of coronavirus infection are located on the German-Czech border.
He praised the measures taken by the Czech Republic to limit the spread of virus variants and criticized the Tyrolean authorities, saying they did not seem to take the issue seriously.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and the governors of the 16 German states agreed late Wednesday to extend the country’s current pandemic blockade until at least March 7, partly due to fears of more contagious variants.
Schools and hairdressers will be able to open earlier, albeit with strict hygiene measures.
In a speech to parliament on Thursday, Merkel defended her government’s decision to set a lower infection target to ease further blockage: a number of new weekly cases per 100,000 inhabitants under 35.
“The virus does not respect the data, the virus tracks the number of infections,” she told lawmakers.
The German disease agency said there had been just over 64 cases per 100,000 inhabitants nationwide in the past week, down from more than 200 before Christmas.
The Robert Koch Institute added 10,237 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 666 deaths to Germany’s totals on Thursday, bringing the total number of cases in the country since the beginning of the pandemic to 2.31 million and the number of deaths to 63,635.