Covid: Germany does not want to end the state of emergency

The corona restrictions according to the Infection Protection Act were supposed to expire on March 19th. But what the FDP in particular marketed as "Freedom Day" is being hollowed out and emptied of meaning by the traffic light colation.

Minister of Health Lauterbach and Minister of Justice Buschmann presented the coalition's new corona plan on Monday, which clearly rejects "Freedom Day" on March 20th. We remember: Actually, the Corona measures should expire in less than two weeks. The FDP in particular had repeatedly announced this in a bold manner. But the draft law from Lauterbach represents the opposite. Although the federal government is largely withdrawing from “fighting a pandemic”, the end of the corona measures is far from sight. The state governments should only be allowed to directly order compulsory masks and tests in public transport and in facilities for the care of the elderly and sick - but apart from the regulation route, the door for escalating corona measures remains open, Lauterbach even emphasized.

The state parliaments should continue to be able to adopt the well-known measures - everything remains the same. It should therefore still be possible to impose general mask requirements, distance requirements and 2G and 3G regulations. "The federal states are given the opportunity to reintroduce 2G if the number of cases is high," confirms Karl Lauterbach on Deutschlandfunk. "Numbers of cases" that are already rising again - thanks to the still worthless and meaningless incidence figures, the easing might not last longer than a few weeks. Fundamental rights are subject to change.

The draft law is now to be pushed through the Bundestag in a hurry by March 20th - once again the federal government has failed to communicate the new corona measures transparently and openly. While the corona measures are being taken almost everywhere abroad, Germany is permanently anchoring the state of emergency. Because it is clear that the corona virus will not disappear after March 20th - and that there will be new waves, too. Increasing, high "case numbers" will come back and be used as a pretext for renewed restrictions on fundamental rights - the Minister of Health explains this quite unabashedly. The fact that the meaningless "incidence", which one actually wanted to say goodbye to, is suddenly back as a benchmark fits the picture: the traffic light coalition does not want the state of emergency to end - and it does not end now.

Source: Tichys Einblick