BERLIN (AP) – Germany on Sunday applied strict border controls at its borders with the Czech Republic and Tyrol province in Austria in an effort to curb the spread of more contagious coronavirus variants.
The new restrictions, which came into effect at midnight, restrict access to German citizens and residents, truck drivers, transport and health workers and a few others, who must register online and show a negative coronavirus test.
The German government has warned that some border delays are possible, but police said there was no major setback on Sunday morning.
Infection rates in Germany have been steadily declining in recent weeks, but officials are concerned about the possible impact of variants first discovered in Britain and South Africa. Both variants have been reported in Germany, but so far it appears to be only for a small proportion of cases.
A significant number of cases of the latter have been discovered in Tyrol, whose residents had to show a recent negative coronavirus test to travel to the rest of Austria since Friday. The spread of the British variant led to the closure of some Czech districts on the border with Germany and Poland.
Bavarian Governor Markus Soeder, speaking at the Czech border in Schirnding, said that “the serious consequences do not take the (virus) mutations seriously.”
Soeder, whose state contains half of the German-Czech border and the entire German-Austrian border, noted that districts on the Czech border have particularly high infection rates.
“In addition, there are currently concerns with our Czech partners that it is unclear what will happen to their corona management,” Soeder said, pointing to the refusal of the Czech parliament to extend a state of emergency. ‘We are friends, we help; we like to take in Czech patients if required, but of course if there were no measures across the border at all, it would mean a significant danger. ”
It was not immediately clear which border commuters would be allowed in Germany. Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said those working in ‘systemically relevant sectors’ would be allowed to cross over and authorities would be ‘pragmatic wherever possible’.
Seehofer brutally rejected criticism of the European Union’s border investigations, and Soeder reflected that. “Brussels can make an important contribution” to moving the vaccination campaign faster, he said, but German police will do their job at the border.
On Sunday morning, federal police said 288 of the 717 people checked at the Bavarian-Czech border had been turned back because they were not entitled to cross, along with 247 of more than 1,000 who had checked at the border with Tyrol. is.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and the 16 state governors of Germany on Wednesday agreed to extend most closure restrictions until March 7, although schools and hairdressers may open earlier.
They set a new target of 35 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants per week before reopening small shops, museums and other businesses. This figure stood at 57.4 on Sunday, compared to 200 just before Christmas.
The governor of the eastern state of Saxony warned Germans to expect too much too much.
“Unfortunately, there can be no Easter holidays in Germany this year,” Michael Kretschmer told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag. ‘Too much mobility due to travel and tourism, already in April, would be poison. We will destroy everything we have achieved since mid-December. ”
Hotels and restaurants in Saxony, which contains the rest of Germany’s border with the Czech Republic and was hit hard in the autumn and winter, will have to stay over Easter, and the reopening of theaters and operas will have to wait until after Easter. he said.
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