What is said in Germany about the mandatory green pass, vaccines and fourth wave
From next autumn in Germany, non-vaccinated people will have to present negative swabs to access closed places. And from October the tampons will no longer be free, but for a fee. Pierluigi Mennitti's article
With the arrival of autumn, those in Germany who have not been vaccinated will have the obligation to present negative swabs whenever they want to take part in events that take place indoors. And from 11 October the tampon will no longer be free but for a fee. Thus ends the season of the so-called citizenship buffer (Burgertest), the test to certify the negativity of Covid so far charged to taxpayers: those who refuse the vaccine will have to bear the costs of this choice.
This is the most incisive point of the package of measures launched by the revived Government-Regions Conference, which returned to meet after many months in view of the resumption of activities after the holidays. With the regionally staggered return of schoolchildren and students to school, public life is in fact reviving and the authorities say they are committed to facing the feared fourth wave of Covid, aggravated by the spread of the delta variant. Infections have been on the rise again for weeks, the average weekly incidence (new infections per 100 thousand inhabitants) which in Germany had dropped around June 6 in June has now risen to 23.5, reaching peaks of over 35 in Berlin. The vaccination campaign has more or less sheltered over 55% of Germans (80% of over 60s), but it is a far cry from the phoenix of herd immunity, whose threshold has also risen precisely because of the delta variant.
So the government and the regions are running for cover, fearing as the Minister of Health Jens Spahn said, a fourth wave of the unvaccinated: those who have not been able to administer the vaccine for their age (all 12 Hungarians, but also many minors) and those classified as being against the vaccine. The first step was to reintroduce the distinction between those who are fully vaccinated and those who are not when it comes to indoor activities.
In fact, if the obligation to wear masks on public transport and in commercial establishments will still apply to everyone, those who have gone through vaccination or are cured of the virus will enjoy a sort of pass for the internal places of events, museums, cinemas, restaurants and bars, gyms and indoor sports activities. Just show the European green pass (which here is called Covid Pass and has been downloadable digitally on the appropriate apps for months) and off you go.
On the other hand, those who have decided to refuse the vaccine, starting from 23 August, starting from an incidence of new weekly cases of more than 35, will have to submit the negative result of the swab, paying for it out of their own pocket (as is already the case in Italy).
In Germany, too, the controversy over this obligation has been reigning for weeks. The opposing press denounces the attempt to introduce a vaccination obligation from the back door, but the political authorities insist on the extraordinary nature of the pandemic situation, on the fact that the vaccine is now available to everyone and that therefore if it is a question of refusal, this it must not fall on the whole community. It is also a question of avoiding a new lockdown, which would have dramatic repercussions on the economy, on civil life, on the education of students. In reality, these are not new measures for Germany: even before the summer, those who had not obtained the double vaccination had to present the negative swab to be able to access closed places, even go into shops or go to the hairdresser. Measures that had then fallen into the summer weeks of low incidence of infections and which now return to face the fourth autumn wave. The same debate on the legitimacy of the double track for vaccinated and cured on the one hand and unvaccinated on the other had already been unleashed in the spring, and is now being revived also for the benefit of the current electoral campaign. The only real novelty is the fact that the tampon will be paid, while until now it was paid by the state.
It will certainly also be an attempt to relaunch the vaccination campaign, which has slowed down in the last month. Merkel did not hide behind a finger: "We must push for vaccination, because it is a defense for everyone," she said in the press conference after the conference. In assessing the situation in the coming months, the weekly incidence of new cases will no longer count. With more than half of the citizens vaccinated, other indicators will be taken into consideration to decide on possible restrictive measures, such as the number of hospitalized people and the number of intensive care occupations. The experts of the Koch Institut are convinced that the fourth wave will still be different from the previous ones and that the positive effects of vaccination will be able to avoid a hard lockdown as in the past. Meanwhile, in the clinics and vaccination centers that have remained open, preparations are being made for the third dose, probably available from September to protect the older age group, the one who had been vaccinated in the first months of this year.
The government-regions conference also extended the Covid state of emergency beyond September 30, setting a new limit at the end of the year. The situation will be assessed in December. This measure will have to be approved by the Bundestag in mid-September.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/germania-green-pass-vaccini-quarta-ondata/ on Wed, 11 Aug 2021 05:37:48 +0000.