Setback in Germany too

[George K]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-reopening.html

A spike of more than 1,500 coronavirus infections within days has dealt a sudden blow to Germany’s efforts to reopen the country, calling into question the durability of what had been widely considered a success story in managing the contagion in Europe.

The new clusters have been concentrated in slaughterhouses and crowded, low-income apartment blocks, which have been quarantined, but they are generating increasing concern that the infections could break out and spread among the broader public.

This week, those concerns spurred the authorities in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia to impose lockdowns in two counties — the first since the country’s broader reopening in May — after hundreds of workers at the Tönnies meatpacking plant in Gütersloh county tested positive for the virus. Neighboring Warendorf county, where many plant workers live, was the second county locked down.

The outbreak at the Tönnies slaughterhouse now stands as one the most severe in Europe, outside of Sweden, according to figures gathered by the European Union. Since then, several hundred workers from two other slaughterhouses have been isolated as well.
Hundreds of police and health workers have fanned out over the region during the last week in an effort to find and test all of the Tönnies plant’s 7,000 workers — many of them seasonal laborers from Eastern Europe who were not properly registered with the authorities, raising fears that it might be difficult to contain the outbreaks with a targeted approach.

But the rise in cases is not limited to that area. Nationwide, health authorities registered 630 new infections on Thursday — hundreds more than the daily total just 10 days ago. The Robert Koch Institute, a federal government agency responsible for disease control, said the number of new cases increased by more than a quarter in much of the country over the past week, spreading rapidly in states that had experienced an outbreak.

“What we are seeing is that the virus is still there,” Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, told RTL television late Wednesday. “Where people make it easy for the virus, where they are careless and don’t respect social distancing and hygiene regulations, it is spreading again very quickly.”