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A woman in Dresden on her way to the corona test (archive)
Photo: Sebastian Kahnert / dpa
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported
175,833 positive corona tests
within 24 hours.
That's 13,272 fewer cases than on Saturday a week ago, when 189,105 new infections were reported.
The nationwide
seven-day incidence
falls further to
1253.3
from 1259.5 the previous day.
250 people
died in connection with the virus.
This increases the number of reported deaths to 122,621.
The total number of registered cases of infection in Germany since the beginning of the pandemic has thus increased to more than 14.57 million.
In November, the federal and state governments had defined the so-called hospitalization incidence as the decisive benchmark for tightening or relaxing the corona measures.
This value indicates how many people per 100,000 inhabitants are in the hospital within seven days because of a corona infection.
According to the current RKI information, the hospitalization incidence on Friday was 6.28 nationwide.
A week earlier it had been 6.24.
Even if the infection numbers in the current omicron wave seem to have peaked, the RKI warned last Friday that the infection pressure in the population would remain very high.
In its weekly report, the institute wrote that due to the easier transferability of BA.2, “a significantly slower decrease or renewed increase in the number of cases cannot be ruled out”.
As analyzes of virus variants show, the BA.2 micro-subvariant, which is probably even easier to transmit, is continuously spreading in Germany.
According to the most recent available data for the week ended February 13, the proportion of BA.2 in a sample of positive findings was just under 24 percent, according to the report.
A week earlier it was just under 15 percent.
Omikron BA.2 has long been dominant in South Africa and Denmark, among others.
From the end of February, modelers, such as a team from the TU Berlin, expect the number of cases in Germany to increase again.
mst/Reuters