Fears grow in Germany of second wave of coronavirus infections – The Guardian

With the Covid-19 pandemic stretching into its third month in Europe, Germany is discovering that a competent handling of the crisis in the early stages can become a burden later on.

As the kind of dramatic scenes of overstretched health services witnessed in Italy or Spain never fully materialised in Germany, politicians have increasingly struggled to convince the public of the need for strict adherence to social distancing. Now this phenomenon, which the virologist Christian Drosten has called the prevention paradox, is fuelling fears of a second wave of the pandemic.

On Wednesday, chancellor Angela Merkel announced the latest gradual reopening of large shops, schools, nurseries, and even restaurants and bars seemingly bowing to a growing impatience with lockdown restrictions that was manifesting itself in political pressure from the leaders of the 16 federal states, the mass tabloid Bild, and growing conspiracy theory-driven protests across major cities.

New hygiene rules announced on Wednesday were supposed to go hand in hand with this relaxation, but are so complicated that many feel they can ignore them altogether. Throughout the week there was a noticeably less cautious mood on the streets of German cities, with clusters of people once again dotting parks to share drinks in the sunshine.

In cities including Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart, demonstrators including rightwing extremists and anti-vaxxers gathered in their thousands on Saturday, protesting against lockdown restrictions that are already being rapidly loosened.

The wearing of hygiene masks, while now mandatory in shops and on public transport, is not consistently policed, and often only casually adhered to.

Over the weekend, the empirical findings of the Robert Koch Institute, the governments disease control agency, seemed to match the anecdotal evidence that many people had gathered over the past few days.

The RKI announced on Sunday that the reproduction number (R), indicating how many new cases one infected person generates on average, had for two consecutive days risen above the critical threshold of one, to 1.1. As recently as Wednesday, when Merkel announced the latest steps of the exit strategy, the R number had been as low as 0.65.

There are several reasons to handle these figures with caution. The R number is an estimate that deliberately ignores lag-prone data from the last three days and backdates known cases to their likely day of infection, around a week earlier.

Rising R numbers over the weekend therefore do not indicate how the spread of the virus developed following this weeks lockdown relaxation, though it could account for a new mood in the country following the first step of relaxation on 20 April.

The RKI itself urged caution on the latest R number since new infections in Germany have dropped to relatively low figures, it said, the estimate was more prone to statistical fluctuations.

Other mathematicians analysing the spread of the pandemic also believe they are witnessing a new dynamic, however. There are signs that the reproduction number is going back up again, said Prof Thomas Hotz of Technische Universitt Ilmenau, which has used a differently weighted model. Hotz added: And if you see how people have started acting in the big cities, it doesnt completely surprise me.

There is some positive news among the latest negative numbers. The number of active cases in Germany on Sunday sank to 17,423, now making up only 10% of confirmed cases in the country, meaning if the virus is indeed accelerating again, it is doing so from a considerably smaller and more controllable base than a month ago.

Under the new emergency mechanism Merkel announced last week, hospitals, care homes or entire municipalities can be put under lockdown if they cumulatively register more than 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants within seven days.

By the weekend, only three German municipalities were in breach of this new limit: one in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, one in eastern Thuringia, and one in western North-Rhine Westphalia.

The hope is that the new, more localised braking system can prove an efficient replacement for a nationwide lockdown and slow down the spread of the virus before it grows into a second wave.

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Fears grow in Germany of second wave of coronavirus infections - The Guardian