More than 100,000 deceased by Covid-19 and a new record of daily infections.
Germany crosses its most violent wave from the beginning of the pandemic, the main challenge of the new government preparing to assume power.
In the last 24 hours, the country registered 351 new deaths, taking the global since the arrival of Coronavirus at 110,119 deceased, according to the data of the Robert Koch Institute of the Federal Government.
This institution also notified 75,961 new infections, a new daily record for the first economy of the euro zone.
The incidence also reaches a new record with 419.7 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the last seven days.
The pandemic emerges as the main challenge for the new government coalition that the reins should take in December after the agreement announced between Social Democrats, Green and Liberals.
“The situation is serious,” the Social Democratic leader Olaf Scholz admitted on Wednesday, who must become the future Chancellor of Germany relieving the conservative Angela Merkel.
The outbreak extends throughout the European continent, currently the world’s region punished by the pandemic with more than 2.5 million cases and almost 30,000 deceased in a week.
And the situation gets worse, especially in countries with lower vaccination rates as the case of Germany or its neighboring Austria, where the government reintroduced the confinement of the population.
In the German case, the fully vaccinated population percentage is around 69%, below other large European countries such as Spain, France or Italy.
Hospitals in certain regions are already facing “an acute overload” that makes the transfer of patients, warned Gernot Marx, president of the German Federation of Intensive Care Physicians.
For now, the future Government Coalition rulesards the idea of a national confinement and is committed to the generalization of a health certificate in transport and access restrictions for those not vaccinated to certain places.
Scholz also indicated that Germany had to “study” an eventual “extension” of the obligation to vaccinate, currently in force in the army and in health and care establishments.
Likewise, it was committed to unlocking 1,000 million euros (1,120 million dollars) for health personnel.
The outgoing Government of Merkel, in coalition with the Social Democrats, prolonged on Wednesday to April 2022 the aid agreed on the companies affected by the closures and the income falls by the pandemic.
The section of the World Health Organization in Europe warned that COVID-19 could provoke 700,000 supplementary deaths on the continent until spring.
The institution attributes this European wave to the combination of the prevalence of the Delta variant, of insufficient coverage of vaccines and relaxation of restrictions.
In the European Union, 67.7% of the population has received at least two doses of the vaccine, although the differences are notorious.
According to Tuesday figures, only 24.2% of Bulgarians are immunized, against 86.7% of Portuguese.
Europe should take “urgently” measures to try to stop this wave, warned the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), EU Health Agency in charge of epidemics.
Several countries have already hardened their restrictions, although this has recently provoked protests in countries such as Austria, Belgium or Netherlands, sometimes violent.
