Coronavirus cases at record in Germany as state health ministers meet

Berlin (dpa) – The health ministers of Germany’s 16 states began a two-day meeting in Lindau, on the shores of Lake Constance, on Thursday as the rising incidence of the coronavirus prompted alarm.

Conference hosts Bavaria called for booster shots of vaccine to be made available to all residents. Klaus Holetschek, the health minister for the southern state said the authorities needed to “get ahead of the situation.”

In Germany, health policy falls largely to the states to implement, although Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has striven to coordinate policy nationwide.

“We will have to discus very, very clearly how to proceed,” Holetschek said before the start of the meeting, conducted with the ministers present – and not on video link – for the first time in months.

The situation in the nursing and care sector would be a high priority, he said. “We can see that nursing is at its limits,” Holetschek said, noting that nurses were leaving hospitals, reducing their working hours and shifting to agency work.

Among the issues being discussed was the possibility of insisting on regular testing in care homes for the elderly. Throughout the pandemic, Germany has been reluctant to impose compulsory measures.

Vaccination rates are causing concern. Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn, currently in office in a caretaking capacity, issued an urgent call on Wednesday for more booster shots, calling on the states to contact all those older than 60 to offer them.

His call was echoed on Thursday by Helge Braun, the head of Merkel’s chancellery, who pointed in particular to rising hospitalizations.

“We are no longer looking at infection rates, but in particular at what is happening in hospitals,” he told national public broadcaster ZDF.

Hospitals in the states of Thuringia and Saxony, in particular, were under stress, he said. Vacacination rates are relatively low in these states.

“Willingness to be vaccinated is the only way that we can have an unstressed winter,” Braun said.

Statistics from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) on Thursday put the proportion of those older than 18 and fully vaccinated at 77.4 per cent, with the overall figure at 66.8 per cent of the population.

The number of coronavirus infections recorded in Germany within a 24-hour period hit a new all-time high of 33,949 on Thursday, surpassing by 172 the figure recorded on December 18.

The figure was sharply up on the 28,037 cases posted a week ago.

Other key statistics also revealed an alarming trend. The seven-day incidence figure – the RKI’s preferred indicator – came in at 154.5, up from 146.6 on Wednesday and 130.2 a week ago.

Another statistic causing concern is the number of patients with the virus admitted to hospital, which is seen as a key indicator for imposing restrictions on the general population.

The RKI put the number for Wednesday at 3.62 per 100,000 residents during the past seven days, up from 3.29 on Tuesday. Given strong regional variations in this figure, there is no nationwide threshold for action. During the Christmas period last year, the figure reached as high as 15.5.

Merkel’s caretaker Cabinet faces a dilemma. As outgoing ministers, they have expressed a reluctance to embark on radical policy-making, while coalition talks to form a new government show little sign of reaching rapid conclusion.