Germany has many gaps in its rules on blocking coronavirus, said the head of the country’s disease control agency, while the figures published on Thursday showed the highest number of daily deaths since the pandemic began.
The Robert Koch Institute reported that 1,244 deaths from COVID-19 were confirmed in one day through Thursday, bringing the total number to 43,881. There were also 25,164 new confirmed cases, bringing the total number of known infections in Germany to close to 2 million.
Lothar Wieler, president of the institute, said the data indicate that people in Germany are traveling more than during the first phase of the spring pandemic, contributing to the spread of the virus.
German authorities have imposed restrictions on social contacts, largely closed schools and limited travel for those in areas with high infection rates, but the rules are not applied uniformly across the country’s 16 states.
“For me, these measures we are taking are not a complete block,” said Wieler. “There are still many exceptions and they are not being implemented strictly.”
Authorities are considering tougher restrictions to stem the continued rise in infections.
The 7-day continuous average of new daily cases has increased in the past two weeks from 23.36 per 100,000 people on December 30 to 26.03 per 100,000 people on January 13.
Wieler pointed to the sharp rise in infections recently seen in Ireland as an example of how fast the outbreak can escalate again if the rules are relaxed, especially due to the new, apparently more contagious variant of the virus that circulates there and in neighboring Britain.
All infections with the variants confirmed so far in Germany have involved people who have traveled abroad, said Wieler.
“We need to be very careful, especially with the British mutation of this virus,” Ralph Brinkhaus, the parliamentary leader of the Merkel bloc, told n-tv. “So, we still don’t know what additional measures will be needed in the coming weeks.”
To ease the pressure on working families who have to care for schoolchildren and discourage them from using emergency services, parliament on Thursday passed a bill that doubles the amount of parental leave paid for 40 days in 2021. Public health insurance will pay up to 112.88 euros ($ 137) per day for parents if they stay at home to care for children under 12 who were unable to go to school because of the pandemic .
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