There had already been warning signs, just two days after the announcement of a gradual return to normal in Germany, a canton had to reintroduce containment on Friday and two others are thinking about it in the face of a number of contaminations that has started on the rise . In North Rhine-Westphalia, a major Covid-19 outbreak was started in Coesfeld in a meat processing plant, in which more than 100 of the 1,200 employees were infected. These facilities have been temporarily closed, said the Minister of Health of this land (regional state), Karl-Josef Laumann.
More broadly, it was decided that the lifting of restrictions on contacts between people, as well as the opening of restaurants and amusement parks would be postponed for a week, until May 18, in this canton. However, schools and nurseries are not affected by this measure.
In Schleswig-Holstein, a border region with Denmark, a slaughterhouse in the canton of Segeberg has registered 109 cases of contamination, which casts enormous suspicion on the entire industry in Germany. In the east, in Thuringia, in the canton of Greiz, which has nearly 100,000 inhabitants, several homes for the elderly have experienced an outbreak of contamination.
The government of this region wants to make a decision next week on the planned relief process for home support measures. "To be clear: we are not going to quarantine the entire canton," said its leader Martina Schweinsburg, but two small towns particularly affected could be affected.
Reconfinement set at 50 infections on average per 100,000 inhabitants
But faced with the risk of a second wave, deemed "certain" by virologists, Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German regions agreed on Wednesday on a reconfiguration mechanism at local level if the number of contaminations by the new coronavirus returned to the rise. This is done by canton, city, or even by establishment when it is a retirement home or a residential building, and no longer as so far generally for a region or the country as a whole. whole.
The trigger for this reconfiguration was set at 50 infections on average per 100,000 inhabitants over a period of seven days per zone. This figure was recently close to 90 in the canton of Greiz and 52.7 in that of Coesfeld, according to the Robert Koch Institute of Public Health (RKI). "We must always be aware that we are still at the beginning of the pandemic and that we still have a long way to go to fight against the virus," warned Angela Merkel on Wednesday.
