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Special session of the German Bundesrat
Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka / dpa
The Federal Council has given the green light for the new quarantine rules for corona infected people and contact persons.
After the Bundestag, the Chamber of States also approved a regulation on Friday that creates a legal framework for this.
Among other things, it stipulates that triple-vaccinated contact persons of corona infected people no longer have to go into quarantine.
In addition, this enables shorter quarantine times in the event of infections in order to prevent a collapse in personnel in important care areas when the number of infections increases sharply.
Infected and double-vaccinated or recovered contact persons only have to be in isolation or quarantine for ten days instead of the previous 14.
After seven days they can be discharged if they present a negative PCR or high quality antigen test.
In the special session of the state chamber, Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) said that the pandemic had arrived at an “interface”.
You're in your third year.
This raises the question of whether it will be possible to defuse the pandemic in such a way that an endemic situation with only sporadic outbreaks and few deaths is reached - or whether this opportunity will be missed.
“We must seize this opportunity and we have the means to do so.
We have the means to largely end the pandemic in Germany this year.«
»Then we would end up in chaos«
Lauterbach again appealed to all citizens who are not yet protected to be vaccinated or boosted.
"If we all claimed that we didn't need it or that we knew better or didn't want to participate or had a different understanding of the state, then we would end up in chaos." That's why he was also in favor of general vaccination.
The health minister stressed that no one should be forced to take any particular vaccine.
Lauterbach said he also got the Novavax death vaccine.
On February 21, Germany will receive a first delivery of 1.75 million doses.
Before the federal-state summit, at which the decision to shorten the quarantine was made, the association of cities and municipalities campaigned for the quarantine of infected boosters without symptoms of illness who work in central areas to be dispensed with.
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) was already open to the shorter quarantine regulations.
The Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hendrik Wüst (CDU), stated that the goal was to maintain the critical infrastructure.
In the ARD "Morgenmagazin" he named the areas of electricity, water, health, fire brigade and police.
muk/dpa
