Germany on edge as Christmas lull in testing skews Covid data

Berlin (dpa) – Germany has been left in the dark about the full scale of its current coronavirus outbreak due to a lag in testing over the festive holidays, top officials warned on Wednesday.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said that the country’s coronavirus incidence, a key metric in measuring the pandemic, could in fact be two or three times higher than official data show.

Lauterbach said the data did show a noticeable and worrying increase in the percentage of cases attributed to the Omicron variant.

He appealed to Germans to spend New Year’s Eve in a way that doesn’t fuel transmission further. “Please celebrate in small circles,” the minister said.

The nation’s institute for disease control said that coronavirus data won’t return to a reliable level until around January 10.

“We expect diagnostic and testing behaviour to return to the level seen in previous weeks towards the end of the first week of January, making the data in the second week of January comparable to the data of the previous weeks,” the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) told dpa.

The agency could not give a more exact time frame due to regional differences in testing, the statement said.

As of Wednesday, Germany’s seven-day incidence, a weekly average of cases per 100,000 people, stood at 205.5, compared to 215.6 the previous day, and 289.0 a week ago.

The RKI reported that 40,043 new cases had been registered within a 24-hour period and that 414 people had died after catching the virus.

However, the RKI’s daily case numbers have come with a caveat in recent days that fewer infections are picked up on over Christmas and New Year.

Many public health authorities are working with reduced staff, while fewer test centres are opening and the frequent testing conducted in schools has been put on pause due to the holidays.

While this leaves Germany uncertain about the full scale of its current outbreak, one thing the nation can be sure about is the spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, according to Dirk Brockmann of Berlin’s Humboldt University.

Brockmann, who sits on the RKI’s Infectious Disease Dynamics Group, pointed to noticeable increases in the number of confirmed and probable Omicron cases registered recently in Germany.

The professor warned the nation against falling into a false sense of security as general infection rates appear relatively low.

This data is of limited significance, as demonstrated by the situation in other countries, he said, adding, “Things can suddenly kick off very quickly and then very strongly.”

The German government is scheduled to hold its next meeting with state leaders on January 7 to coordinate the nation’s response to the pandemic. By the RKI’s calculations, that could be too soon to make informed decisions based on the data.

However, Lauterbach insisted that Chancellor Olaf Scholz would enter his talks with the premiers equipped with “a solid and completely sufficient data base.”

The minister said current restrictions in Germany introduced to curb the spread of the Delta variant, such as vaccination and testing requirements for large parts of public life, may not be sufficient in response to the much more contagious Omicron variant.

Nonetheless, he advised against basing predictions on spiralling case numbers in other countries, pointing out that these places often did not have as strict measures in place as Germany.