Germany’s Maas on defensive over coronavirus travel warnings

Berlin (dpa) – German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has defended the lifting of Germany’s blanket travel warning for all coronavirus risk areas planned for Thursday.

“The time for blanket assessments must be over,” Maas said on Tuesday on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Matera in Italy.

“There’s no reason to maintain restrictions where there are positive developments,” he added.

The German government decided almost three weeks ago that it would lift the travel warning for all risk areas with a seven-day incidence rate of more than 50 new infections per 100,000 people.

More than 80 countries around the world currently fall into this category. In addition, the government would no longer give blanket advice against tourist travel abroad.

For EU countries, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland – which are no longer classified as risk areas – the travel advice of the Foreign Office will in the future simply be to exercise “special caution.”

This applies, for example, to Italy, Austria, Greece and large parts of Spain.

From July 1 onwards, the travel warning for tourist trips would only apply to areas with an incidence rate of above 200, and to those areas where dangerous virus variants are spreading rapidly.

Around 40 countries fall within this category, mostly outside Europe, with exceptions being Britain, Portugal and Russia.

Anyone returning to Germany from a virus variant area must be quarantined for 14 days – even if they are fully vaccinated or recovered.

Those who are not German citizens and do not have a residence in Germany are not allowed to enter the country by plane, bus or train.

Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for disease control on Tuesday said that only few infections are carried into Germany by travellers.

In the last four weeks, only 1,036 coronavirus cases were reported where the infection likely happened abroad – about 2 per cent of all recorded infections, according to the RKI report.

“This shows that travel-associated cases play a secondary role in the current infection situation,” the RKI wrote, without giving further details about where those infections were contracted.

Nonetheless, there have been calls from some of Germany’s state governments for more stringent controls to be implemented against travellers returning from summer holidays abroad.

Bavaria’s state premier Markus Soeder, for example, called on the federal government to be stricter about testing and quarantine obligations.

“The refusal of the federal government to deal more intensively with the issue is, in my view, incomprehensible,” he said on Tuesday, “and, to be honest, it’s also somewhat disappointing.”

He said Bavaria would present a concept that would also include a comprehensive plans to monitor compliance with the testing requirement at the borders with the Czech Republic and Austria.

The EU was also sceptical of Germany’s plans for returning travellers, but for different reasons.

A European Commission spokesperson criticized the new measures imposed on travellers from Portugal, pointing to guidelines the EU countries had previously agreed to.

These include refraining from travel bans and to rely on quarantine and testing requirements as a way to prevent virus variants from spreading across the continent.

“The German measures do not seem fully aligned with this,” spokesperson Christian Wigand said.