Even before the start of the Corona summit on Wednesday, Bavaria's Health Minister Klaus Holetschek is positioning himself very clearly.
In doing so, he destroys the hopes in retail.
Munich - The retail sector is pushing for openings.
“The fashion trade in particular often no longer knows what to do next,” says Stefan Genth, head of the German trade association.
When working in shops and department stores, there is no higher risk of Corona * infection than in other areas, emphasizes the trade association for trade and goods logistics (BGHW).
To underpin this, a study was carried out with the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA).
Result: The risk of infection * when working in retail is not increased.
Munich in lockdown: below-average infection rate among employees in retail
Among other things, data from eleven retail companies with around 331,000 employees were evaluated.
Between mid-March and the end of October 2020, around 0.6 percent of employees contracted the virus.
In contrast, around 0.8 percent of the general population became infected during the same period.
Thus, the proportion of sick employees is even below the mean of the corresponding age group in the general population.
One could counter the fact that during the first wave in April many shops were completely closed - so an infection there is difficult.
But even in the food retail trade, which was open in all lockdown * phases, the frequency of infections remained inconspicuous.
There were no significant differences in the trading areas considered.
Munich in lockdown: praise for corona management of retailers
According to the BGHW, “the protective measures taken by the company” are decisive.
All of the companies surveyed had also used corona management with their own contact tracking.
“This has very likely contributed to the fact that infections were usually restricted to individual employees.” The BGHW also points out that short contact times, as is typical in retail, generally involve lower risk of infection than longer contact times.
Bavaria's Minister of Health gives business on Tuesday little hope of quick openings after the Corona summit and the cabinet deliberations in the state parliament.
"Despite good intentions, the retail sector is faced with the problem that it cannot really control customer gatherings in retail spaces or when queuing at the door or sometimes at the cash registers," says Klaus Holetschek (CSU *) of our newspaper.
In spite of the mandatory FFP2 mask *, it is therefore "difficult to grant an exemption to an entire industry if the number of incomprehensible opportunities for infection is still too high and the general incidence rate is still too high".
(Sebastian Horsch) * merkur.de is part of the nationwide Ippen-Digital editorial network
