“Many children are still suffering today” from corona measures, says Lauterbach
“There was no scientific evidence for school closures”
How much have children and young people suffered from the corona restrictions? “The entire health of society was not taken into account when taking the pandemic measures,” medical journalist Christoph Specht accuses the decision-makers of the time.
BHealth Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) has again described the school closures and other corona measures as “too strict in some cases”. “Many children are still suffering today, they suffer from mental disorders, their health has deteriorated,” said Lauterbach in the Bundestag. On Friday, Parliament debated the report by the interministerial working group on the health effects of the corona pandemic on children and young people, which was presented in February.
“Of all those who have made sacrifices in the pandemic, the children have made the most sacrifices,” said Lauterbach. They would have “suffered from the measures”. The minister conceded again: “The school closures should not have been made in this length.”
Federal Family Minister Lisa Paus (Greens) also pointed out in the debate that the pandemic for children and young people is not over. More than 70 percent of them still felt mentally stressed, and other crises such as the Ukraine war and the climate crisis put additional strain on the young people. Paus emphasized that politicians have the task of giving greater consideration to the concerns of children and young people when setting priorities.
“Most Difficult Considerations”
The Minister for Family Affairs referred to measures that have already been initiated, such as increasing early support for young families, investing billions in improving the quality of day-care centers or expanding all-day care at primary schools. So-called mental health coaches will also start at schools in the summer, who will support children and young people and provide “first mental aid” in acute crises.
The CDU MP Mareike Lotte Wulf admitted that at the beginning of the corona pandemic three years ago, the then grand coalition had to make “extremely difficult considerations”. To condemn this across the board “would be too easy”. With the current traffic light government, however, she lacked “the evidence” that she was serious about the responsibility for dealing with the consequences of Corona for children and young people.
Wulf criticized the fact that the funds for this had fallen significantly. While the grand coalition has provided two billion euros to catch up on learning deficits, for early childhood education and leisure activities, the traffic light government is only planning a “package for the future with 40 million euros”.
Drosten: Population immunity led to the end of the pandemic
According to the Berlin virologist Christian Drosten, population-wide immunity against the corona virus has led to the end of the corona pandemic in Germany. “We are now in a situation across the population that we are immune. That is population immunity and that is why the pandemic is over now, ”said Drosten at an event of the Research Network for Zoonotic Infectious Diseases on Friday in Berlin.
The Charité professor emphasized that the pandemic is not over because the omicron variant is mild. “Omicron is not mild. That’s just a public misrepresentation,” said Drosten. “What puts us in a better situation is the vaccination in particular and then the possibility of finally being able to infect ourselves on the basis of the vaccination without dying.” The so-called hybrid immunity protects perfectly against severe courses. Hybrid immunity is when a person is both vaccinated and infected, or has recovered.
Drosten had already in a “Tagesspiegel” interview at the end of 2022 commented on a pandemic end, but felt misunderstood afterwards. In the podcast “Coronavirus Update” at NDR-Info said the virologist in January that he actually said something different than what had arrived in parts of the public. The end of the pandemic cannot be announced in advance, you can only look at it afterwards – i.e. after this wave.
