BERLIN (AP) – The German government on Thursday decided to temporarily reintroduce border control along its southeastern border after designating the Czech Republic and parts of Austria as ‘mutation areas’ due to their large number of cases of coronavirus, the German news agency dpa report.
The temporary border control and certain access restrictions will start on Sunday at midnight, dpa reported.
Travelers coming from certain areas of Austria or the Czech Republic will have to provide proof of a negative coronavirus test to enter Germany, a requirement that thousands of cross-border workers face.
It was not clear how long the border control would last.
The governor of Bavaria, Markus Soeder, whose land borders both Austria and the Czech Republic, said earlier Thursday that if the federal government designates the Czech Republic and the Tyrol region as mutations, Bavaria will ask permission to set up border posts where travelers which is not present a negative COVID-19 test will be rejected.
Soeder said that all but one of the regions of Bavaria with high coronavirus infection rates were located on the German-Czech border.
He praised the measures taken by the Czech Republic to curb the spread of virus variants and criticized the Tyrolean authorities, saying they did not seem to take the issue seriously.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and the governors of Germany’s 16 states on Wednesday agreed to extend the country’s current pandemic lockout to at least March 7, in part due to fears of more contagious variants.
Schools and hairdressers will be able to open earlier, albeit with strict hygiene measures.
In a speech to parliament on Thursday, Merkel defended her government’s decision to set a lower infection target to further ease the closure: a number of new weekly cases per 100,000 residents under 35.
“The virus does not track dates, but the virus does track the number of infections,” she told lawmakers.
The German Disease Control Agency said there had been just over 64 cases per 100,000 residents nationwide in the past week, up from 200 before Christmas.
The Robert Koch Institute on Thursday added 10,237 new confirmed COVID-19 cases and 666 deaths to total Germany, bringing the country’s total number of cases since the start of the pandemic to 2.31 million, and the death toll at 63,635.