© Reuters
– “The situation is becoming very difficult,” Merkel said tonight.
The Robert Koch Institute for Disease Control has declared Bulgaria a country at high risk for coronavirus infection, which means that from Sunday at midnight the entry from the country into Germany will take place only after a negative result of a PCR test, announced the DPA agency.
Since November 1, Bulgaria has been in the penultimate category of a risky country.
The same category includes Poland and Cyprus from European countries, as well as Kuwait, Paraguay and Uruguay. The requirements for Great Britain and Ireland, which were previously in the high risk category, are decreasing. The same goes for the Portuguese province of Algarve, which is a popular tourist destination, but hotels there still do not accept guests.
The criterion is that the threshold of 200 new cases per 100,000 population for the last 7 days has been exceeded.
DPA points out for Poland that the country does not provide data for the last 7 days, but on Friday it reported almost 26 thousand new cases of coronavirus for the past day. According to the Ministry of Health in Warsaw, more than 60% of cases are due to the so-called British version of COVID-19.
Today in Berlin there was a meeting of the federal government with the prime ministers of the 16 provinces, at which it was decided to send vaccines to GPs, as well as to the border areas with the Czech Republic and France.
“The motto is ‘Vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate,'” Chancellor Angela Merkel told a news conference.
The number of those infected is rising in Germany due to the release of measures in recent weeks, coinciding with the spread of a more highly contagious variant of the coronavirus, Reuters reported. This only highlighted the importance of speeding up vaccination, the agency added. As of Friday, only 8.5% of the population had received the first dose of vaccine.
“I think we have a good chance to offer a vaccine to every inhabitant of the country by the end of the summer. I will be vaccinated with AstraZeneca,” Merkel said.
But Health Minister Jens Spahn said today that vaccination alone will not sustain the third wave of the pandemic because there are not enough doses. According to him, the lifted restrictions must be returned.
“The growing number of cases means we can no longer lift restrictions in the coming weeks. On the contrary, we may need to take steps back,” he explained.
The leaders of the federal states will meet again on Monday to discuss extending the blocking measures in force since mid-December, as well as whether and for how long to cancel plans to gradually reopen the economy.
In Germany, the principle of activating an “emergency brake” is agreed if more than 50 new cases per 100,000 people per day are registered in an area for 7 days.
Details coming later at www.dnevnik.bg.
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