German Chancellor Angela Merkel wears a protective mask when leaving after speaking to the media for her annual summer press conference during the coronavirus pandemic on August 28, 2020 in Berlin, Germany.
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Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to announce that Germany will extend its blockade until March 14 amid concerns about new strains of the coronavirus.
A draft document emerged on Wednesday morning outlining plans between Merkel and state officials to maintain the blockade and ask citizens to maintain the rules of social detachment, but to gradually lift some restrictions in the coming weeks.
The reopening of schools is a priority for the German leadership, although the country’s federal system means that individual states must be able to decide how to do this. The reopening of shops and hotels could begin next month in areas where the infection rate is also low. The restrictions were due to end on February 14.
There are concerns in Germany about the spread of more contagious variants of the virus, particularly the mutation discovered in the UK last fall. Still, the daily number of new infections in Germany has fallen amid the continuing blockade of public life across the country.
The public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute, reported 8,072 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday and 813 deaths, bringing the total number of infections so far to about 2.3 million, and the number of deaths to 62,969.
Early Wednesday, a German lawmaker described the situation as “highly fragile”.
Slow EU implementation
The slow launch of coronavirus vaccines in Germany, as well as in the rest of the EU, is a nightmare for the German government, which is a fundamental pillar of the bloc. The EU was slower than the United Kingdom and the United States to order vaccines from leading drug manufacturers and faced shortages of supplies.
The longer it takes to implement the vaccination, the longer the economic damage of the blocks will be. Germany’s economy contracted 5% in 2020, according to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) data for the whole year released in January.
Ludovic Subran, chief economist at Allianz, told CNBC on Wednesday that the slow implementation of vaccination could really hurt the EU’s growth prospects in 2021.
“I am getting a little nervous, and it is only in February, that we are missing the boat here, that vaccination is the best investment there is and we should put all our strength (efforts) there,” said CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe”.
“Our forecasts show that Europe will not return to pre-crisis (growth) levels until 2022, and then we saw the vaccination chaos and we started to think ‘OK, we are really compromising the recovery here’ … the problem is we are vaccinating four times slower than in the UK and the USA here, “he said, adding:” This is really a big problem, because it will make or break the 2021 GDP recovery for Europe. “
—Annette Weisbach of CNBC contributed to this article.