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Karl Lauterbach on easing the corona measures: "We would pour oil on the fire and accelerate the wave"
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Event industry expects wave of layoffs in March
5:35 a.m .:
Two years after the start of the corona pandemic, the event industry is facing a wave of layoffs, according to industry information.
The reason for this is the expiry of the short-time allowance after 24 months.
"More than three quarters of the event companies will give notice to their employees in March 2022 due to a lack of short-time work," said Jan Kalbfleisch, Managing Director of the Federal Association of Event Management, the dpa news agency.
He was referring to a survey in which more than 800 industry companies took part.
According to this, employees in two-thirds of the companies have been on short-time work for more than 20 months.
For almost half of those surveyed, the proportion of short-time work is over 80 percent.
According to Kalbfleisch, if the companies had to pay the salaries and social security contributions themselves in full, the majority of them would lack the capital for a new start.
They would then have to lay off employees because they could not cover their costs.
Companies are losing valuable skilled workers in this way.
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The federal government is sacrificing the event industry, criticized Kalbfleisch.
Almost all events have now been cancelled.
There is no prospect of improvement for the more than 100,000 companies.
The short-time allowance that employers have to apply to the employment agency for their employees is intended to compensate for a loss of wages in times of crisis.
Access was made easier during the corona pandemic.
Most recently, the federal government extended the maximum entitlement period from 24 months to the end of March.
Cancellations of trade fairs, concerts, conferences and celebrations cause problems for event outfitters, technicians, artists, stand builders and many other people involved.
Lower corona numbers in summer and autumn temporarily brought part of the business back.
In the past few weeks, however, the industry has experienced another wave of cancellations, according to the association.
Hundreds of thousands of surgeries postponed because of Delta
5:11 a.m .:
German hospitals estimate that operations had to be postponed or canceled for well over a hundred thousand patients in the delta wave.
"We don't have final numbers for the delta wave yet, but we're talking about hundreds of thousands of treatments that have been postponed," says Gerald Gass, the chairman of the board of the German Hospital Society, of the "Augsburger Allgemeine".
Many patients are on the waiting list.
For the whole of the past year, more than a million postponed interventions must be assumed.
Children's representatives concerned about taking children to Corona demos
4:59 a.m .:
The honorary chairman of the German Children’s Aid has expressed concern about the taking of children to Corona demos. Under certain circumstances, this could be a threat to children's welfare or even radicalization, said Rainer Becker of the dpa news agency. If it is foreseeable from the outset that there will be arguments, »then children have no business being there«. It's about protecting health. Such scenes could also traumatize the children. Even if an escalation is not foreseeable, but a demo should develop in this way, the parents would have to go away with their children.
"In principle, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child also grants children freedom of assembly and demonstration." That's a good thing.
»Because they should also be introduced to democracy.«
Nevertheless, it is a "no-go area" for him when children are instrumentalised.
He referred to speeches by children that did not match their age.
It makes a difference whether children go to demos that are even organized by children and young people, whether you take children with you and discuss different opinions with them “or whether you turn the children into an ideological mouthpiece”.
Messages like, »The state is evil, it wants to poison us.
The police are bad, they come with batons or pepper spray" could also contribute to children becoming radical teenagers or young adults, warned Becker.
"Children shouldn't be raised to be yes-men, but they shouldn't be raised to be enemies of the state either."
The former police director referred to paragraph 171 of the penal code.
Accordingly, "the violation of the duty of care or upbringing is a criminal offence".
This should already be pursued officially.
According to the law, police officers would have to determine the identity of children if they had the impression that they were being used.
Left: Government is chasing the pandemic
4.55 a.m .:
Before the federal and state consultations on how to proceed in the corona crisis on Monday, the left accused the federal government of failings in its test strategy. "It has not only been known since today that the demand for corona tests will increase due to the omicron wave," said co-party leader Janine Wissler of the dpa news agency. The capacities should have been expanded in good time.
The planned prioritization of PCR tests is a symptom of “that the government is chasing after this pandemic instead of finding concepts and recognizing problems at an early stage and containing them quickly”.
Wissler referred to the Austrian capital Vienna, where more PCR tests were carried out than in all of Germany.
In this country you can also have yourself tested by private providers, but at prices that not everyone can afford.
Clinics in the north have so far been able to cope with the omicron wave
04.42 a.m .:
In the cities of Bremen and Hamburg, which were hit early by Omikron, clinics have so far come through the current wave of infections without any major problems, despite the increasing number of patients.
"The situation is manageable," said Professor Stefan Kluge, head of the clinic for intensive care at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE).
Only "isolation-related absences" of staff presented the colleagues with challenges.
"The good news is that current data from different countries shows that the risk of having to go to the hospital with an omicron infection is reduced by more than half compared to the Delta variant," said Kluge.
"Load yes, overload no," said a spokesman for the Bremen health department on the situation in the clinics.
I am concerned that more and more patients are infected with Corona who were not admitted because of Covid-19 but for other reasons.
This makes treatment in the normal wards more complex.
Nationwide, the occupancy of normal wards rose by 3.5 percent last week, as announced by the German Hospital Society (DKD) in Berlin.
In Schleswig-Holstein the increase is 22 percent, in the states of Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin between 10 and 15 percent.
Green politician Nouripour can understand some Corona demonstrators
4:36 a.m .:
According to the Green politician Omid Nouripour, part of the Corona protest scene can be “regained” with talks and persuasion.
Nouripour, who is applying for the Green Party presidency together with Ricarda Lang, told the dpa news agency: “There is a hard, sometimes militant core that I have no sympathy for, but I have empathy for many who are unsure about it. «
He had visited people who were against the Covid 19 vaccinations and also had such people in his circle of acquaintances.
In personal conversations, he notes "that their individual experiences have shaken their trust in the institutions."
In addition, there are often stressful situations as a result of the pandemic, such as the loss of childcare and a lot of time in the home office.
The "hard core of the corona deniers" should be judged differently, said Nouripour.
Some of these are people from the right-wing milieu who fundamentally question the free-democratic basic order: "I'm afraid they've lost their hops and malt."
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In the corona crisis, external actors also tried to damage German democracy, which represents competition for their authoritarian models of rule.
An example of this is "fake news about vaccination spread abroad by Russian media," said the Green politician.
A number of countries also tried to use the pandemic to make geostrategic gains from it.
"For me, this includes China, which does not allow a comprehensive scientific investigation into the origin of the virus and also spreads false information via state media." An example of this is "the case of an imported German pork knuckle, which is said to be the cause of a corona outbreak in a Chinese city was«.
Seven-day incidence rises to 772.7
4.30 a.m .:
Two days before the federal and state round on the corona situation, the Robert Koch Institute registered 135,461 new infections.
The seven-day incidence has reached a new high.
Rio postpones famous carnival parades again
3:19 a.m .:
In the midst of a new corona wave, the Brazilian metropolis of Rio de Janeiro has again postponed the world-famous carnival parades.
"Due to the increase in Covid-19 cases in the city, we are announcing that we will move the carnival to the Tiradentes holiday in April," said a tweet from the Rio city government on Friday evening (local time).
The holiday falls on April 21.
The decision was made after a meeting between the mayors of Rio, Eduardo Paes, and São Paulo, Ricardo Nunes, the health secretaries and presidents of the samba school associations of the two cities. Mayor Paes canceled the street carnival in Rio earlier this month for the second time in a row. The plans for the legendary parades in the Sambodrome in February and March, which were also postponed and then canceled last year, remained in place. There, controls to protect against infection are easier to implement, said Paes.
However, health experts have indicated in the Brazilian media that they would advise against the spectacle in the sambodrome because the virus cannot be controlled despite planned protective measures.
A corona-related cancellation would mean another loss of millions after the 2021 failure.
Despite the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, samba schools have been preparing for the possible moves for months.
According to official figures, more than 23.5 million of Brazil's 210 million residents have been infected with the corona virus.
Almost 623,000 patients have died related to Covid-19 - one of the highest death tolls worldwide.
Almost 70 percent of the Brazilian population is now fully vaccinated.
Recently, the number of new infections has increased enormously, also influenced by the omicron variant and celebrations at Christmas and New Year's Eve.
On Wednesday, Brazil reported more than 200,000 new corona cases in one day for the first time.
Doctors' Association: Clinics will reach their load limit by February at the latest
2.40 a.m .:
With the number of corona infections continuing to rise so rapidly, the Marburger Bund medical organization sees the clinics at their limit in just a few days.
"By the beginning of February at the latest, it will be very tight in hospitals across Germany if the number of infections continues to rise at this rate," said Chairwoman Susanne Johna to the newspapers of the Funke media group.
It's not just about increasing patient numbers, said Johna.
"We expect that in the coming weeks a large number of medical and nursing staff will be absent because they have become infected and have to isolate themselves." This applies to outpatient care as well as to inpatient care.
A further increase in the number of infections could mean “that the care of the population will no longer correspond to the usual standard,” said Johna.
Unlike in the first wave of the pandemic, it is no longer a question of too little technology or too few ventilators.
"The staff is the bottleneck."
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The Federal Association of Private Providers of Social Services also warns of a threat to care in view of the increasing shortage of nursing staff. Its President Bernd Meurer told the "Welt am Sonntag": "Without additional forces - whether from the Bundeswehr or from civil protection - there is a significant risk to supply." The load limits have been reached and further staff shortages can no longer be coped with. The association represents 12,000 nursing homes and social services.
Caritas Altenhilfe, which operates 72 senior citizens' facilities in three federal states, called for the vaccination requirement for nursing staff to be suspended.
"In view of the relatively mild course caused by the Omicron variant and the current shortage of staff, compulsory vaccination for employees in care facilities is no longer justifiable and must be suspended until there is a decision on general compulsory vaccination," said a spokeswoman for the newspaper.
By March 15, according to federal law, employees in health and care facilities must submit proof of a completed vaccination, proof of recovery or a medical certificate of their non-vaccinability.
Retail: lift the ban on night-time deliveries of goods
1.40 a.m .:
The German Trade Association (HDE) calls for the lifting of the ban on nightly deliveries in inner cities and the Sunday driving ban for trucks in order to avoid goods bottlenecks in the Omicron wave.
"The night-time bans for trucks entering many cities prevent deliveries to retail branches," says HDE general manager Stefan Genth of the editorial network Germany.
Politicians must now decide very quickly and take precautions so that any delivery problems that may arise can be solved quickly.
cop/dpa/AFP/Reuters
