German Chancellor Angela Merkel is wearing a protective face mask as she leaves after speaking to the media for her annual summer press conference during the coronavirus pandemic on 28 August 2020 in Berlin, Germany.
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Chancellor Angela Merkel will announce that Germany will extend its exclusion until March 14 amid concerns about new strains of the coronavirus.
A draft document emerged early Wednesday outlining plans between Merkel and government officials to maintain the lock and urge citizens to uphold social rules, but to gradually lift some restrictions in the coming weeks.
The reopening of schools is a priority for the German leadership, although the country’s federal system means that individual states are expected to be able to decide how to do so. The reopening of shops and hotels could begin next month in areas where the infection rate is also low. Restrictions would end on February 14th.
There are concerns in Germany about the spread of more contagious variants of the virus, particularly the mutation discovered in the UK this past autumn. Yet the daily number of new infections in Germany has declined amid the constant closure of public life throughout the country.
The public health body, the Robert Koch Institute, on Wednesday reported 8,072 new cases of coronavirus and 813 deaths, bringing the total number of infections so far to 2.3 million and the death toll to 62,969.
Earlier Wednesday, one German lawmaker allegedly described the situation as “very fragile”.
EU slow implementation
The slow introduction of coronavirus vaccines in Germany, as well as the rest of the EU, is a crossbar for the German government, which is an important pillar in the bloc. The EU has been slower than the UK and US to order vaccines from major drug manufacturers and has supply shortages.
The longer the vaccination takes, the longer the economic damage due to closures will be prolonged. Germany’s economy shrank by 5% in 2020, according to GDP (gross domestic product) for the full year announced in January.
Ludovic Subran, chief economist at Allianz, told CNBC on Wednesday that the slow vaccination could really hurt the EU’s greater growth prospects in 2021.
“I’m getting a little nervous, and we’re only in February that we’re missing the boat here, that the vaccination is the best investment out there and that we need to put all our efforts there,” he told CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe.”
“Our forecasts show that Europe will only return to pre – crisis levels (growth) in 2022, and then we see the vaccinations chaos and we start thinking ‘OK, are we really endangering the recovery here’ … the problem we are vaccinating four times slower than the UK and US here, “he said, adding:” This is really a big problem because it is going to make or break the 2021 GDP recovery for Europe. “
—CNBC’s Annette Weisbach contributed to this article.