Tuesday, November 9th, 2021
Emergency ends, pandemic does not
Traffic light dares “communicative balancing act” against Corona
From Sebastian Huld
The traffic light parties want to install a new corona regime: On Thursday, the Bundestag will discuss a draft law that should give the states a variety of measures to hand. A nationwide, daily test obligation at the workplace for unvaccinated people is explosive.
The pandemic will not end on November 25, but at least the pandemic situation of national scope will expire. This means that measures to restrict the freedom of vaccinated citizens are excluded for the time being. This is how the traffic light parties want it, they must also want it, because various court judgments have long since denied that such restrictions on freedom are still appropriate in view of the high number of vaccinated people.
However, since the number of seriously ill unvaccinated people and the number of at least corona-positive vaccinated people are going through the roof these days, the future federal government is facing various challenges, which it wants to meet with the help of a new infection protection law and additional instruments. The main goal of avoiding overloading the health system, which was the main reason for lockdowns and school closings until spring, is now to be achieved in other ways. The focus is on the amendment to the Infection Protection Act, which brings the fight against pandemics from the Prime Minister’s Conference back to Parliament.
Test all workers daily
Perhaps the most far-reaching decision of the amendment concerns the introduction of a nationwide 3G rule at workplaces. Those who have not been vaccinated or recovered should be tested daily. For this purpose, all employees would have to be given the opportunity to query the vaccination status of each employee and to save the corresponding information. At the behest of the parliamentary groups of the SPD, Greens and FDP, the Federal Ministry of Labor of the SPD Minister Hubertus Heil is currently working out details on feasibility. It is still unclear how employers can be monitored and employees who are unwilling to test can be sanctioned by the employer.
A first reading of the law is planned for Thursday. Then, within the framework of the amendment to the law, there will also be test obligations for employees in geriatric care and facilities for people with disabilities. According to SPD health politician Sabine Dittmar, unvaccinated employees could also be tested at least twice a week. PCR pool tests are therefore up for debate. Dittmar as well as the Green MP Maria Klein-Schmeink and the FDP politician Christine Aschenberg-Dugnus emphasized on Tuesday that the protection of vulnerable groups is particularly important in this phase of the pandemic.
No compulsory vaccination, but free tests
At the same time, the upcoming traffic light alliance does not seek to make vaccinations mandatory for certain professional groups. Obviously, this cannot be done with the FDP in particular. “Personally, I do not consider a compulsory vaccination necessary,” said Aschenberg-Dugnus. Klein-Schmeink also referred to the concern of some state governments that compulsory vaccination could expel unwilling employees from the care sector, where there is already a shortage of personnel. Instead, it is now planned to establish better “monitoring”, because missing data is a fundamental problem even 20 months after the start of the pandemic. The federal government has “no good overview of the vaccination rate in the homes,” said Dittmar with a view to the employees there.
The return of the free Corona citizen tests, which should make it easier for the countries to make 3G the general minimum standard for access to closed rooms, is mainly due to the Greens. Klein-Schmeink described their expiry under the grand coalition as a “big mistake”. Dittmar, on the other hand, spoke of a limited value of the citizen tests in the past to identify sources of infection. Dittmar explained that unvaccinated people should also be tested again for free, among other things with the bureaucratic problems that a different treatment would bring with it.
Health care “massively burdened”
The coalition partners agree that test conditions alone will not be enough to get the fourth wave under control. “The entire health system is facing very great challenges,” said Klein-Schmeink. “I already consider the situation serious.” The intensive care units are “already very full,” said Aschenberger-Dugnus. The health system works, said Dittmar, but it is “massively burdened”. And: “The outpatient practices also have a lot to do with the vaccinated patients with the lighter course of the disease, of course.”
The health politicians see the only solution in broader vaccination, both of the unvaccinated and the double vaccinated with a booster syringe. Looking at the example from abroad, Klein-Schmeink was optimistic that “the 2G / 3G regulation will encourage one or the other” to get injected. Basically, people of all ages benefited from booster vaccinations, Dittmar said, referring to Israeli data.
There is a problem with the booster
Dittmar is concerned that the booster vaccinations – depending on the federal state – are only progressing slowly. Although the first priority group, with around eight million people, is mainly the very old, whose vaccination was six months or more ago, only 2.5 million booster vaccinations were administered. With priority group two, the number of those eligible for booster will soon rise to 19 million people. Dittmar therefore spoke out in favor of restarting vaccination centers and offering flu vaccinations there. “The flu vaccination can be in the left arm and the booster in the right arm,” said Dittmar.
While, according to the Federal Ministry of Health, there is enough vaccine available for boosting, there is apparently a problem with the distribution to the practices. According to Klein-Schmeink, the lead time from the order to the vaccination appointment in the practices is currently three weeks. The ordering process has now been made easier for the practices. “That was turned off by the minister after we worked towards it,” said Klein-Schmeink, referring to Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn from the CDU. Chancellery chief Helge Braun called on Tuesday morning to create 20 million booster vaccinations by the end of the year.
Black hangover game between traffic lights and union
The fight against corona is getting into an unexpectedly rough dispute between Union politicians and traffic light coalitionists these days. Spahn and Chancellor Helge Braun recently complained that the SPD refused to attend a conference of ministers presidents to better coordinate the various measures. CSU regional group leader Alexander Dobrindt reprimanded the measures in the Traffic Light Infection Protection Act as inadequate.
The traffic light politicians pushed the black cat back into the opposing camp: Health Minister Spahn had failed to prepare legal regulations for the time after the pandemic had expired. In the past few months, your parliamentary group has repeatedly approached the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) with proposals for laws, said SPD health politician Dittmar. “Neither the BMG nor the Union parliamentary group saw this need and that is why we were not ready in August to give up the pandemic situation.”
Dittmar sees the fact that the pandemic situation will end on November 25th, but at the same time the fight against the rising number of cases will be continued with different measures, also regionally, as a “communicative balancing act for the people out there.” The debate on Thursday could provide a little more clarity – provided that Heils Ministry can spell out by then how exactly a 3G rule is to be enforced in the workplaces.