Berlin mulls longer coronavirus shutdown

Berlin: Germany’s daily coronavirus death toll crossed 1,000 for the first time on Wednesday, with politicians predicting an extension of the county’s partial lockdown beyond the current January 10 deadline.

A total of 1,129 deaths were reported by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) disease control centre, breaking the previous daily record of 962 logged last Wednesday. There were 22,459 new daily infections, the RKI said.

"The infection and death figures show that we are still very far from normality," Health Minister Jens Spahn told reporters in Berlin. "I don’t see how, in this situation, we can return to how things were before the lockdown," he added.

An apparent drop in new infections and deaths in recent days was a result of local authorities not sending in their data over the Christmas period, the RKI said. Germany is under a partial lockdown until January 10, with most shops closed along with schools, restaurants, cultural and leisure facilities.

New Year’s Eve festivities will be muted, with a ban on the sale of fireworks and tight restrictions on the number of people who can gather in public. "It will probably be the quietest New Year’s Eve that Germany can remember," Spahn said.

The health minister had on Tuesday told German broadcaster ARD that the country was "nowhere near where we need to be" and "there will undoubtedly be measures" after January 10.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders of Germany’s 16 federal states will meet on January 5 to decide on future measures. Armin Laschet, the leader of Germany’s most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia, told the DPA news agency that "no one can seriously raise this hope" of restrictions ending soon.

Berlin mayor Michael Mueller also told the ZDF broadcaster he believes "we will have to continue to live with restrictions" for some time. The eastern regions of Saxony and Thuringia remain hotspots in the country, with 330 and 255 infections per 100,000 inhabitants respectively.

More than 32,000 people have now died from the virus in Germany, which appeared to fare relatively well in the spring but has been hit hard by a second wave. The country began its vaccination drive on Saturday, with a 101-year-old woman in a care home becoming the first person to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech jab.

Around 78,000 people have so far received a first dose of the vaccine, data released Wednesday said. But some German regions have reported delays in receiving and administering doses.

Berlin’s health minister Dilek Kalayci said Wednesday that the city-state would be suspending its campaign until January 11 after a planned delivery of almost 30,000 doses was cancelled.

Britain on Wednesday approved a second coronavirus vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, which is cheaper and easier to transport than the Pfizer-BioNTech jab. But the European Medicines Agency is unlikely to approve it until after January, the regulator’s deputy executive director Noel Walthion told Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad.

Germany’s Bild daily accused the government of having "relied too much on the European Union" in its vaccine strategy and of favouring the BioNTech-Pfizer jab over the Moderna product.

But Spahn said he believed in the "European way" and defended Germany’s approach. "Yes, there have been bumps in the road, but the biggest vaccination campaign in history has started successfully," he said.

According to Spahn, Germany is to receive a combined total of more than 130 million doses of the BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.Meanwhile, the number of coronavirus cases in the Chinese city where the pathogen was first detected may have been 10 times higher than official figures suggest, according to a study by health authorities in Wuhan.

About 4.4 percent of the city’s 11 million residents had developed antibodies against the virus causing Covid-19 by April, the report by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control (CDC) said. That correlates to around 480,000 infections in Wuhan by April, nearly 10 times the official tally to date of 50,000 cases in the city.

China has faced a barrage of criticism at home and abroad over its initial handling of the virus, including attempts to silence whistle-blowers and not reporting any cases for days in early January amid high-level political consultations.

On Monday, citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was jailed for four years for reporting on conditions inside Wuhan during the height of the outbreak. The discrepancy revealed by the CDC’s data may "point to potential underreporting due to the chaos in late January and early February, when a large number of people were not tested or were not tested accurately for Covid-19," Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told AFP.