Ended, bars, cinemas, swimming pools and sports halls... Finished, concerts, museums and even barbecues in the parks... The children who came to find the path to the school and the Kindergarten are again cooped up at home... the inhabitants of The Kreis (district) of Gütersloh in north Rhine-North rhine-Westphalia have found the strict corset of the containment. The measures announced Tuesday morning by Armin Laschet, minister president of the Land and potential candidate for the succession with Angela Merkel, have a very sour taste of déjà-vu.
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While in the rest of Germany, life has resumed to almost normal and that people are enjoying the weather, 365 000 people are again confined. The rules in effect during the containment of the month of march are again applied. A part of these restrictions has also been extended to the neighbouring canton, that of Warendorf, in which live 280 000 people. Advertisements in the newspapers and cars with loudspeakers call on the population to get tested for free. This is the army and the Red Cross who are assigned to carry out the tests. In deciding to déconfiner, a few weeks ago, Germany had decided on a red line not to exceed : beyond a rate of 50 per 100 000 inhabitants, the lockdown would be re-enacted. This is done for the first time.
The home of the slaughter-house
This is the cluster of infections at Covid-19 in the factories of the giant Tönnies, the largest slaughterhouse in Europe, who need this machine back drastically. 1 550 people working for Tönnies have been tested positive. The 7,000 employees of Tönnies and their families have been placed in quarantine. The police shall ensure that this measure is respected. 24 people who do not work for Tönnies, but live in the canton of Gütersloh have also been contaminated. In the absence of a vaccine, containment is the only effective solution to avoid the spread of the virus, say local authorities. In a first time, it will remain in force until 30 June. No one is able to say today if it will be renewed. A hard blow to the economic health of these regions who had only to resume a rhythm almost normal.
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in the Face of this nightmare of reconfinement, the concern is much stronger in the rest of Germany that the reproductive rate of the virus is passed to 2,88. A person with the virus infects, on average, between two and three others. The Robert Koch Institute, responsible for assessing daily the overall situation of the pandemic, emphasizes that this strong increase is due to some of the clusters (the slaughterhouse Tönnies, a building HLM in Berlin), but that on the whole the situation is not alarming in Germany.
Yet, with the summer holidays which begin on Friday in some of the Länder, in particular in Berlin and Hamburg, and the beautiful weather that attracts hundreds of city dwellers in parks, the risk of a new wave of infections is not excluded. The mayor of Berlin has called on the youth to face up to their responsibilities by avoiding the crowds of mass and respecting the rules of distancing. The capital has planned to intensify police patrols in the parks to disperse the crowds too many. "The virus is always there, takes care to remind Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute in each of its interventions. It will not disappear entirely in Germany. "
