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People stand in a long queue in Berlin's Neukölln district for a corona test
Photo: Kay Nietfeld / picture alliance / dpa
It could soon be a done deal: If Chancellor Angela Merkel discusses measures to contain the corona pandemic with the prime ministers of the federal states, then the result may be: Germany is cutting public life back sharply, almost like in spring.
What does a second shutdown mean specifically for the virus?
A shutdown is the mother of all corona measures and, from a virological point of view, the most effective means of preventing the uncontrolled spread of the virus.
However, it is by far the greatest burden for the population - not only from an economic point of view, but also with a view to mental health.
The essence of a shutdown is the massive limitation of contacts for each of us.
According to the federal government, only members of one's own household and of another household should then be allowed to stay in public together.
The aim of the envisaged measures is to briefly reduce the number of new infections through massive measures so that outbreaks can be controlled again, according to researcher Viola Priesemann from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen.
A shutdown in November might be enough.
In spring, when the first shutdown of the pandemic in Germany had its effect, the number of newly infected people halved about every seven days.
Priesemann assumes that doubling the number of new infections will require around an additional week of strong measures to halve the number again.
A one-month shutdown, as is now being discussed, could noticeably inhibit the spread of the virus.
Secure tracking, detect superspreader events
Last but not least, the experts hope that by shutting down public life, the health authorities will again enable better follow-up.
The Robert Koch Institute had already warned that more and more cities and districts in Germany can no longer adequately document the routes of infection due to capacity problems.
Experts believe that tracking sources of infection is a crucial point in the strategy against the virus.
It can only be checked if the transmission routes are known.
Chains of infection are only broken if both individual cases and superspreader events can be tracked.
"Each undiscovered individual case potentially becomes a larger cluster," says Priesemann.
Undiscovered corona cases are currently driving the pandemic.
It has been known for a long time that superspreader events play an important role in the spread of the coronavirus, in which individual infected people infect many others.
If a person infected with corona is infected in such a cluster, all people in this cluster must be isolated for a few days, said virologist Christian Drosten.
However, this is only possible if these sources of infection can be recognized at all through many tests.
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