Icon: enlarge
Chancellor Angela Merkel with Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder and Berlin's Mayor Michael Müller
Photo: MICHAEL KAPPELER / AFP
This article is continuously updated.
Don't miss a thing: subscribe to our
coronavirus newsletter
for the latest developments and the most important background information
.
Merkel wants to bring the crisis summit forward to next week
3.03 a.m.:
There may be a further tightening of the corona rules across Germany.
Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) urged on Thursday evening at a CDU presidium meeting for a crisis summit with the state heads of government in the coming week, as the AFP news agency learned from participants.
Merkel therefore also pleaded for tightening.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) considers the current shutdown to be inadequate.
The virus can only be stopped with significantly additional effort, said Merkel, according to participants in the CDU presidium meeting.
Baden-Württemberg's Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann (Greens) also called for a crisis meeting as early as next week.
The next federal and state crisis summit is actually not planned for January 25th.
In Germany, a shutdown has been in effect since mid-December with extensive closings in retail and services, in schools and daycare centers as well as contact restrictions.
At the beginning of January, the measures were tightened and extended until the end of the month.
According to participants in the CDU presidium meeting, Merkel spoke out in favor of further reducing contacts with citizens, mainly because of the coronavirus mutation that is rampant in Great Britain.
With a view to reports on considerations of discontinuing local and long-distance transport, she said that no one wanted to restrict public transport.
But this must be relieved by more home office.
Lauterbach: Closure of companies due to the corona crisis can threaten
1.13 a.m.:
According to the SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach, if the number of corona infections continues to be high, companies may be threatened with closure.
"The lockdown is not as successful as it needs to be," said the medic in the newspapers of the Funke media group (Friday editions).
Companies would have to be more involved in the lockdown.
"We should make the home office mandatory - wherever possible." The companies themselves are well advised to do their part to bring the lockdown to a successful conclusion.
"Otherwise we may at some point be forced to close businesses too," said Lauterbach.
"We might even have to approach industrial production." Nobody could want that.
Lauterbach called the previous effect of the lockdown disappointing.
"We are in a very precarious situation." If more contagious Corona variants were to spread more widely in Germany, "we would have a huge problem."
A new high for corona deaths pushes the debate about new restrictions in Germany.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported on Thursday that 1244 people who had tested positive for the virus had died within 24 hours.
Weil is calling for the Astrazeneca vaccine to be approved for speed
0.08 a.m.:
The Prime Minister of Lower Saxony Stephan Weil (SPD) calls for the EU to speed up the approval of the corona vaccine from the British-Swedish manufacturer AstraZeneca.
Although he thinks the approach to be correct when procuring vaccines is European, Weil told the editorial network Germany.
But he does not understand "why certain vaccines are approved later in Europe than in the rest of the world."
"It is of crucial importance that we now get approval for the vaccine from AstraZeneca as soon as possible," said the SPD politician.
With this vaccine, thousands of general practitioners could join the vaccination campaign, "which would really get things going."
Involving family doctors would be a "breakthrough", according to Weil.
So far, the vaccine from the Mainz-based company Biontech and its US partner Pfizer, as well as the agent from the US company Moderna, have been approved in the EU.
AstraZeneca applied for approval on Tuesday.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) wants to review the application for conditional approval of this vaccine by the end of January.
The UK was the first country in the world to approve AstraZeneca at the end of December.
After that Argentina and India also approved this vaccine.
The AstraZeneca vaccine, which was developed together with the University of Oxford, has the advantage over the previous products that it is significantly cheaper and easier to store.
Icon: The mirror
kim / dpa / AFP
