The German Ministry of Health announced Wednesday that the country would complete its mandatory viral tests for travelers returning from foreign threat spaces and concentrate its testing strategy on others with symptoms or exposure imaginable to COVID-19.
At a press conference in Berlin on Wednesday, Health Minister Jens Spahn said that in recent weeks, the peak holiday season, when many citizens were traveling, Germany had nearly doubled its tests to 900,000 per week at airports, exercise stations and road stops.
The new measures mean that from the mandatory tests, travellers returning to Germany will have to be quarantined.
Spahn told reporters that the holiday era was ending and that other people were ingesting less, the threat would be minimized again. He said the government would resume testing for others with symptoms that are in contact with COVID-19 patients after the end of the season in September.
Free trials were conducted in the first week of August after new cases of coronavirus exceeded the 1000-a-day threshold for the first time since May, fueling fears of a return to blockades.
Some fitness professionals felt that the tests were useless because some travelers, who had tested negative at airports, produced positive effects several days later. There was also a shortage of gadgets.