BERLIN (AP) – Germany announced on Sunday that travelers from the northeastern Moselle region of France will face additional restrictions due to the high rate of coronavirus cases.
The German disease control agency, the Robert Koch Institute, said it would add Moselle to the list of “variants of concern” areas that already includes countries such as the Czech Republic, Portugal, the United Kingdom and parts of Austria. .
Travelers in these areas must take a recent negative coronavirus test before entering Germany.
The Moselle region in northeastern France includes the city of Metz and borders the German states of Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate.
Clement Beaune, the French minister for European affairs, said France regrets the decision and is in talks with Germany to try to ease measures for the 16,000 Moselle residents working on the border. Specifically, he said France does not want them to face the daily PCR virus tests that Germany has applied elsewhere to travelers from some borders.
“We don’t want that,” he said.
Beaune said France is pushing for easier and faster testing methods and for testing every 2-3 days instead of daily. More talks were expected Sunday, he said.
The weekly rate of new infections in the Moselle, with more than 300 per 100,000 people, is well above the average for the eastern region of France and the national average. In Germany, the number of cases per week currently stands at almost 64 per 100,000 inhabitants.
The Robert Koch Institute recorded 7,890 recently confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Germany over the past day, bringing the total to more than 2.4 million cases. The death toll rose from 157 to 70,045.
German officials have warned that variants of the virus such as the one first detected in Britain (known as B.1.1.7) could spread more easily and feed the infection rate at a time when Germany is slowly relaxing. its blocking measures.
“There are two trains running towards one,” said Karl Lauterbach, an epidemiologist and lawmaker for the center-left Social Democrats.
He called on Germany to give priority to giving as many people as possible an initial dose of vaccine, as some other countries have done, including the AstraZeneca shot currently reserved for under-65s. Businesses and schools should also do weekly or more tests once possible, and those with a negative result should also be able to visit stores again.
Bavarian Governor Markus Soeder also urged changing the way AstraZeneca fired. The vaccine has been rejected by many who hoped to fire the German company BioNTech and Pfizer, or a similar one made by the American firm Moderna.
Soeder said Sunday it was “an absurd situation” that many who want to get vaccinated can’t, while those who can’t want to.
“Anything left over must be released,” he said.
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