Germany will have no choice but to introduce tougher restrictions to curb coronavirus infections if people do not reduce contacts significantly, the head of the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases (RKI) said on Thursday.
People have so far reduced contacts by around 40% on average, but contacts will need to be cut by at least 60%, in order to bring infections down, Lother Wieler said as he urged people not to travel over the Christmas holiday period.
"If people cannot achieve this 60% reduction on their own, then other measures will have to be considered. If they do not succeed, I see no other option," he told a weekly news conference.
Europe's largest economy has been in partial lockdown for six weeks, with bars and restaurants closed but shops and schools open. That has stopped the coronavirus' exponential growth, but the second wave of COVID-19 is proving far more difficult to tame and is extracting a heavier human toll than the first one.
Germany's reported COVID-19 death toll increased by 440 to 20,372 over the past 24 hours, RKI data showed.
Confirmed coronavirus cases increased by 23,679 to 1,242,203, setting a new record daily rise. The previous record was an increase of 23,648 reported on Nov. 20.
Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday threw her weight behind calls for a fuller lockdown in Germany that would include closing shops after Christmas. Vaccines alone will not have a major impact on the pandemic's course in the first quarter, she told legislators.
A vaccine of US drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech is a top contender in the global race to beat back COVID-19. Wieler said he expects the first vaccine to be approved in the European Union around the turn of the year.
Some 43% of Germans would get a COVID shot as soon as a vaccine becomes available, according to a survey of 1,002 people conducted by Forsa on behalf of RTL and ntv on Dec. 7/8. Half of participants said they would hold off for the moment, and 7% said they did not want to get a COVID shot.
