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Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz
Photo: JOHN MACDOUGALL / AFP
The federal and state governments want to adopt new measures in the fight against the Omikron variant on Friday.
SPIEGEL has received an initial proposal for a resolution from SPD circles.
According to this, vaccinated and convalescent people should only have access to gastronomy with a current negative test result from January 15 at the latest.
Contact restrictions to ten people remain in place, clubs and discos remain closed.
The subject of the resolution is also a rule on quarantine reduction agreed between the Federal Chancellery, North Rhine-Westphalia, Berlin, the Federal Ministry of Health and the Robert Koch Institute.
In contrast to the recommendation of the Conference of Health Ministers, the draft does not distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
At yesterday's conference there had been a tussle over the topic: the Federal Ministry of Health and RKI had jointly developed a proposal that Karl Lauterbach (SPD) had presented.
The state health ministers also presented a draft resolution.
In the event of infection or contact with an infected person, according to the new draft, those affected should now be
in isolation or quarantine for ten - instead of the previous 14 - days
.
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They can be discharged after 7 days
if they present a negative PCR or high quality antigen test.
Personnel in hospitals, nursing homes and integration assistance facilities may be released from quarantine or isolation
after 5 days
with
obligatory
PCR
testing if the person concerned has been symptom-free for 48 hours beforehand.
Children can also be released from quarantine after five days with a negative test; the same rules apply to isolation as to adults.
Boosted individuals do not need to be quarantined after contact with an infected person.
The following groups are equated with them in the draft with regard to the quarantine of contact persons:
"
Vaccinated convalescents
" (for example, those vaccinated with a breakthrough infection or convalescents who received a vaccination following the illness)
"Freshly"
double vaccinated
if the second vaccination was less than three months ago
Recovered
if the illness was less than three months ago
The decision concludes: "All measures are based on the agreement of uniform national minimum standards, further measures in the federal states remain possible." The federal states also explicitly refer to the recommendation of the Expert Council.
He had met on that day for the second time this week and reiterated his assessment from before Christmas: Accordingly, it is now necessary to take precautions to ensure that the critical infrastructure is not overloaded.
In its opinion, the Expert Council noted that studies from the USA and Great Britain indicated milder courses of infection with the Omicron variant.
Expert advice sees high stress on hospitals
"The strong infection dynamics and the associated high number of diseases occurring in parallel threatens to quantitatively outweigh the advantage of the milder course of the disease compared to the delta variant," the experts write.
But because Germany has a comparatively low vaccination rate, the Expert Council does not give the all-clear: "All medical and nursing care facilities have to be prepared for a considerable stress situation for the coming weeks."
In order to counter the situation, a "balanced quarantine regulation" and, if the number of infections increases, "further intensification of the contact restrictions" may be necessary.
cte / mfh