The German government is expected to announce tighter border controls following warnings from leading experts that the move is crucial to controlling the spread in the country of more contagious variants of Covid-19.
It is widely reported that the chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of her CDU party colleagues that air travel in particular must be restricted “to the extent that you can no longer get anywhere.” .
Interior minister Horst Seehofer said in an interview with tabloid Bild that the threat posed by the recent Covid mutations, particularly the B117 first discovered in the UK, “needs dramatic measures”.
He said: “The threat posed by coronavirus mutations requires us to examine and consider the more stringent measures, including much deeper border controls, especially in those areas that are affected. “go around high – risk zones, as well as reduce air travel to Germany to more or less zero, just as Israel is currently doing, to prevent the introduction of virus mutations.”
The German government is coming under increasing pressure, from the virologists and epidemiologists advising them, with Belgium being seen as an outrider after it closed its borders to all traffic but required Wednesday. The Belgian ban will initially take effect until March 1, and will ban holiday and leisure travel. Law enforcement agencies want to carry out strict inspections on roads, at airports, ports and railways. Excluded from the ban are the transport of goods, visits to marriage partners or same-sex partners, travel for work or study purposes as well as attendance at funerals of close relatives.
Sandra Ciesek, professor of virology at Goethe University in Frankfurt, has called for Europe-wide border regulation: “We must try to delay the spread of variables in Germany. That can only work across Europe, as we do not live remotely on an island, ”she said in a weekly podcast on the radio station NDR.
Graf
Being at the heart of Europe, surrounded by nine countries, Germany is particularly at risk from the cross-border spread of the virus. But politically and morally, decision-makers have been shutting the borders off the board throughout much of the crisis, a stance rooted in Germany’s long-standing commitment to an open Europe. The current debate is a replica of the 2015 refugee crisis, when Merkel said it was morally necessary to keep the borders open to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who came to Germany.
The 506-mile (815 km) Czech border is seen as a particularly weak point in German efforts to control the virus. The Czech Republic’s death from coronavirus is now among the highest in the world and nearly a tenth of the population is known to be infected. The B117 variant is known to spread across the country. As of Monday, the 35,000 Czechs who travel to Germany for work on a regular basis, from medical workers to cleaners, will have to present a new negative test every 48 hours before being allowed to enter Germany. Industry leaders have complained that the rule is closing. Long queues are formed at the end of those waiting for a test, leading to anger and frustration.
Christian Drosten, head of virology at Charité Teaching Hospital in Berlin, said plans for stricter travel restrictions “make sense from a scientific point of view”. He said: “The stronger the brakes are applied to the spread of the coronavirus in the country, the more important it is to check what is being imported from the outside,” he told the ARD broadcaster.
But the pro-business liberal FDP has led the calls for reconsideration, saying instead of introducing travel restrictions, the national effort should focus on getting the vaccine to so many Germans. By lunchtime on Tuesday just over 1.672 million Germans had received the injection, compared to around 7 million people in the UK.
“Flight and travel bans will not help at a time like this… faster vaccination,” Wolfgang Kubicki, deputy director of the FDP, said in an interview with Funke Mediengruppe. “Vaccines are the most reliable and the only way out of this pandemic,” he said, accusing the government of “replacing real solutions with tokenism”.