Lean annual balance sheet: only one corona test for every federal police officer

Tuesday, March 9th, 2021

Lean annual balance sheet
Only one corona test for every federal police officer

Border controls, corona deniers, large-scale operations: Federal police officers risk their health every day in the corona pandemic. But still not really much tested.

The federal police have carried out a total of around 50,000 tests for the corona virus on their employees since the pandemic began. This emerges from a response from the Federal Ministry of the Interior to a request from the FDP parliamentary group that ntv has received.

In view of around 51,000 employees, this means that every federal police officer has been tested for the corona virus only once on average in the past twelve months. The Federal Ministry of the Interior wrote that 12,000 PCR tests were carried out externally and over 2700 rapid PCR tests were carried out using our own equipment. 38,000 rapid antigen tests were also provided. Around one percent of the tests were positive.

The FDP interior expert Konstantin Kuhle criticizes that the federal police are testing "too much". Federal police officers in particular should be able to rely on the employer to protect them and their families, Kuhle told ntv. He calls for more test options for employees: "In the future, the Federal Police should use rapid tests on a large scale and give all employees the opportunity to be tested if they wish."

No regular testing

The officers have not yet been tested on a regular basis. Tests "at time intervals" are "not specified", according to the answer from the ministry. There is also no support for private tests "unrelated to official business".

In this context, however, this number is interesting: For example, there were positive corona cases "unrelated to work" in 1283 employees (as of February 16). 463 employees were again tested positive with a "possible business connection". Tests were carried out primarily before large-scale operations, in the area of ​​repatriations or when symptoms occurred or when there was contact with a person without a respirator.

Less overtime

A positive development: The overtime of officers of the Federal Police could be reduced by 500,000 hours in 2020 compared to 2019, according to the government response. At airports in particular, the number of overtime hours has been significantly reduced due to the lack of air traffic in the pandemic. In 2020, however, there were still 1,416,958 overtime hours.

FDP politician Kuhle described the number of overtime hours accumulated as "frightening". This indicates that the police force is still too thin, according to Kuhle, who calls on the Federal Ministry of the Interior to increase the number of staff in the Federal Police "more intensively". "It shouldn't take a global pandemic to reduce the mountain of overtime," says Kuhle.