The state government is experiencing the biggest breakdown since the beginning of the crisis: tens of thousands of the highly sensitive tests on travelers returning home were wasted. Even 900 positive results come much too late. The fear of the vacationers was completely justified.
- As announced, those returning home were tested for the new corona virus * on Bavaria's motorways.
- Only the results were a long time coming.
- There are now 900 infected people in Germany without knowing anything.
Munich - It's a very morose afternoon for Melanie Huml , you can tell. Some sentences end in nothing, the numbers waft through the stuffy air in the foyer of their ministry. “There's nothing to gloss over it,” she says, and between many ahs it turns out that that's a gentle understatement .
What Huml has to say is extremely bitter: She admits that 44,000 tests by holidaymakers returning home on Bavaria's motorways were left behind for days - 900 of them were positive .
Will have been informed about the extent of the sloppiness late: Bavaria's Minister of Health Melanie Huml is at the center of the criticism.
© Nicolas Armer / afp
Anger over the Minister of Health had been brewing for days. More and more returning travelers wondered, first silently, then louder and louder that they were not getting any results of their tests . Politicians acted as if they were isolated cases .
Even when affected politicians reported who were also waiting for their tests. Even when the newspapers reported about it. Even when Prime Minister Markus Söder was pricked up over the weekend. Even when our newspaper submitted a questionnaire on Tuesday . Huml says she didn't find out about the scale of the problem until Wednesday morning .
The cause is banal: Because Söder's pressure had to go quickly at the test stations, the data of the tested people were improvised when recording the data : handwritten, scribble-scribble - in the laboratories it was noticed that the assignment of the 60,000 tests takes forever. In any case, helpers, laboratories and politicians were surprised by the rush at the test stations .
Medically, the test breakdown is bitter: 900 infected people have been running for days across the whole of Germany who do not yet know about their positive test. Only for those who come from risk areas , a valid quarantine compulsory , and which is best monitored lax. Politically, this is more than a scratch on the image of Söders and his government as a maker . He of all people, who stands for a cautious course with quick action , has to answer for a huge mishap .
Mockery is already arriving nationwide. Söder should " hold back a few days with clever advice and put things in order," says FDP parliamentary deputy Michael Theurer from the Bundestag. "Söder cannot crisis," says Green Party leader Ludwig Hartmann : "Blatant government failure". In addition, it is fermenting in Söder's own coalition. Free voter faction manager Fabian Mehring speaks in a post on Facebook - a reply to taunts from the CSU - of " obvious failure of CSU ministers ".
Beyond the breakdown it turns out, of course, that Söder and Co. were absolutely right with the establishment of the test centers themselves and the warning of returnees. The percentage of positive tests shows: every 40th holidaymaker who entered on the A3 via Eastern Bavaria is infected . The reason is likely to be the Balkan route . Nationwide data from the Robert Koch Institute, also updated this Wednesday, shows: Over 1000 returnees came back Corona-positive from Kosovo, 260 from Croatia, 500 from Turkey. Spain and Ballermann are popularly discussed in public, but only a fraction of the cases entered Germany from there.
There is no hiding: Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder will have to listen to a lot of criticism after the test breakdown.
© Peter Kneffel / dpa
Bavaria now wants to sweep up the broken pieces. Huml promises " night shifts ", from now on all data will be digitized . Each of the 900 infected will be informed by Thursday noon. Mainly the motorway centers are affected , so things went much better at the airports. As far as we know, no test was completely lost, she says. (Christian Deutschländer) * merkur.de is part of the Ippen-Digital network
We inform about all developments in Germany in our news ticker - the RKI recently made a mega-breakdown. A new study could shed some light on why so many people are dying from Covid-19.
List of rubric lists: © Peter Kneffel / dpa