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Berlin (AFP) – Germany will make coronavirus testing mandatory for travellers returning from high-risk areas, Health Minister Jens Spahn said Monday amid fears of an increase in the number of cases attributed to summer holidays and local outbreaks.
“We want to prevent returning travelers from infecting others without being noticed and therefore trigger new chains of infection. So I’ll order mandatory testing for travellers in at-risk spaces,” Spahn wrote on Twitter.
Regulations will take effect next week, the Ministry of Health tweeted, and will be free.
The debate over coronavirus testing intensified over the weekend after the 16 German states agreed friday to lose evidence for all returning travellers, before testing is mandatory.
After an assembly with state officials on Monday, the Chancellor’s staff leader, Helge Braun, said there is a “great preference for approaching those mandatory tests.”
“The consultation of how this can be implemented will now have to be analyzed in detail and I think we will succeed in a solution quickly,” he said.
Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Soeder had previously joined a chorus of voices that called for testing to be mandatory for returning tourists.
“We are preparing everything so that if the federal government gives the go-ahead, we can put it into effect immediately,” he said.
However, this resolution has also provoked complaints from those who believe that relying too much on testing can lead to complacency.
“The one-time tests don’t offer security,” Ute Teichert, director of a national doctors’ agreement, said in an interview with media organization Funke. “On the contrary, they can lead to a false sense of security.”
– Bavarian agricultural epidemic –
However, politicians plan to accentuate to isolate infections early.
In Bavaria, Soeder said the state of southern Germany will establish coronavirus sites at its two largest stations, as well as key highway problems.
In addition to the existing control centres at Bavarian airports, the controls will now be presented at Munich and Nuremberg stations, as well as on 3 main motorways near the Austrian border.
Soeder said Bavaria would also check all seasonal agriculture in the state, following a giant coronavirus outbreak on a giant farm.
Some 500 were quarantined as a result of the outbreak, as at least 174 seasonal ones tested positive for the virus on the farm in the municipality of Mamming, most of them from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine.
Workers dressed in masks were noticed on Monday moving on the steps of the boxes used to skid them in the remote rural site.
Residents of Mamming Township were presented with loose coronavirus tests, with makeshift testing centers installed in the area.
A woman who called Brigitte said she would come for the test so she could hug her grandson without being concerned about the spread of the virus.
“I’m too worried that the staff stayed too far apart,” he said. “But I need to be sure.”
To curb new farm outbreaks, Soeder said the state would impose fines on farms that violate regulations at 25,000 euros ($29,400), five times the existing fine.
Germany has achieved better results than many of its neighbors in suppressing the virus, reporting more than 200,000 cases and 9,118 deaths to date, according to the Robert Koch Institute for Disease Control.
But the country has also been affected by repeated coronavirus outbreaks in slaughterhouses, keeping the government on high alert.
“From what has happened in the last few days, with more than 800 instances a day in some cases, we want to go back to a scenario where we are well below 500,” Braun said.