Image 01 Image 03

European Coronavirus Second Wave: Merkel Tells People to ‘Stay Home’ as German President Goes in Quarantine

European Coronavirus Second Wave: Merkel Tells People to ‘Stay Home’ as German President Goes in Quarantine

“Belgian and Austrian foreign ministers test positive for coronavirus after EU summit.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged people to stay home as Germany faces a second wave of coronavirus outbreak. The country now faces a resurgence of the Chinese virus with a record rise in new cases since the pandemic hit Europe.

“I ask you to refrain from any trip that is not really necessary, any celebration that is not really necessary. Please stay at home — wherever you are, whenever possible,” Merkel said in an address to the nation on Saturday. Germany was in a “very serious phase” of the outbreak with “the number of new infections is increasing by leaps and bounds every day,” she warned.

“Germany has reported 7,334 new coronavirus cases in its daily update, the most it has recorded since the virus first emerged in the country,” Germany’s state-run DW News reported on Saturday. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier went into quarantine on Saturday after one of his staff members tested positive, a government spokesperson confirmed.

“We are currently seeing a widespread increase in infections, and we have experienced an extreme rise in large cities like Berlin and Bremen,” Helge Braun, the head of Merkel’s Chancellery told magazine Der Spiegel.

Germany’s DW News reported Chancellor Merkel’s alarming remarks:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday urged residents to stay at home amid a dramatic increase in the number of coronavirus infections in Germany.

“We have to do everything we can now to ensure that the virus does not spread uncontrollably — every day counts,” Merkel said in her
weekly podcast.

“I ask you to refrain from any trip that is not really necessary, any celebration that is not really necessary. Please stay at home — wherever you are, whenever possible,” she said.

Merkel said that Germany was currently in the midst of a “very serious phase” of the pandemic, adding that “the number of new infections is increasing by leaps and bounds every day.”

“The comparatively relaxed summer is over; now we are facing difficult months. How winter will be, how our Christmas will be, will be decided in the coming days and weeks. We all decide that through our actions.” (…)

On Saturday, the Robert Koch Institute for disease control said Germany recorded 7,830 new coronavirus infections in the past 24-hour period, a new record since the pandemic began.

The number of cases was nearly 500 higher than on Friday and more than 1,500 higher than the prior infection peak recorded in March.

The second wave of the Chinese contagion hit the European Union leadership as well. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a long-time Merkel loyalist, entered quarantine on Thursday after one of her staffers tested positive for the virus. Foreign ministers from two European states, Belgium and Austria, contracted the virus during a EU summit in Luxembourg this week, local media reported on Saturday. The meeting was attended by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and by foreign ministers and top envoys from 26 European member states.

The Wuhan virus is not only resurfacing in Germany, neighboring France too reported record figures. French “health ministry reported more than 32,000 new confirmed cases of Covid-19, the highest single-day tally since the start of the pandemic,” TV channel France24 reported Saturday. Nine of the biggest French cities, including Paris, face night-time curfew amid rising numbers. Other European countries, including the United Kingdom are reporting a similar trend.

Surging numbers shatters the myth of European, particularity German, ‘exceptionalism’ in masterfully tackling the Chinese pandemic. Merkel was feted as a model for world leaders to follows, while U.S. President Donald Trump was mocked and jeered by the mainstream media at every step of the way since the pandemic broke out.

“A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low,” The New York Times asked in July while lauding Merkel’s policies. “How Germany got coronavirus right,” London’s Financial Times wrote in July. “From extensive testing to early track and trace, Germany is a model for tackling the disease.” Such EUrophile coverage in hindsight looks biased and premature today.

With Trump at the helm, the U.S. has proven itself more resilient in face of the global outbreak, even in economic terms. The EU economies, directed by Merkel and Macron, are in worse shape in the wake of the pandemic compared to the U.S. under Trump. Amid the outbreak, the U.S. economy outperformed European economies. The euro currency zone, which includes France and Germany, reported an annualized GPD decline of over 40 percent, higher than the drop of 33 percent registered in U.S. between April-to-June quarter.

‘Restrictions tighten further in Europe amid second wave of infections’

DONATE

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.

Comments

Interesting watching all these Dunning Kruger suffering losers force people into a second lockdown. Like the first wasn’t damaging enough.

    Well, yes, economically, socially, in excess; but, apparently, not politically.

    Again, and again, and again, until they protect their vulnerable, allow their productive youth and adults to resume normal life, stop collections and redistribution, and promote good sanitation and hygiene across the diversity as in color, not diversity as individual, of their nation. This will be a recurring phenomenon until exponential expansion is suppressed by denying the virus safe sanctuary and open borders to spread throughout the population. A vaccine 1.0 (i.e. stimulant) is one way. A vaccine 2.0 (i.e. antibodies) is another. Follow the epidimeoloy, good practices in context, and recognize the threshold of exponential suppression (i.e. herd immunity). That said, I wonder if they will do this for every pathogen, every season, throughout the year, often as infectious, just as deadly. When the virus from Wuhan was novel, special treatment made sense, but it has evolved, still present, still infectious, still deadly, but less viable in the minority of the population that are vulnerable.

Yes, Covid-19 is dangerous to the average MP, PM, or other high ranking government functionary. It’s a terrible threat to the elderly.

Why are they locking down everyone else, too? (The question is rhetorical, by the way)

And don’t forget to shut the windows, close the drapes and turn out the lights!

Seriously, we just returned to WA from rural IL for a family wedding; 100+ attended the wedding and reception; 40+ the rehearsal and dinner the night before. In a small rural church, only a handful of people wore masks. We loaded up on the C, D3 and Zinc before during and after the trip with no sign of Covid nor any of the other attendants.

Had an interesting experience using a drive-thru. The driver of the car in front was smoking and paid in cash. When I paid, I got at least one of the bills in change from the driver in front which smelled like smoke. It leads me to wonder if the primary mode of transmission for Covid is via currency? It would make for an interesting comparison the dips and swells of Covid infection mapped against the dips and swells of commerce.

That I’m aware, my wife and I haven’t had it, or if so were asymptomatic. With rare exception, we pay for everything via online payments or credit cards at POS machines where only we handle our cards and have contact only with a keypad to enter a PIN.

It makes me wonder if one of the eventual goals of all this is going paperless / e-money toward a one-world economy? Will they eventually declare paper money the main culprit in all this?

    MajorWood in reply to MrE. | October 18, 2020 at 1:33 pm

    I for one do not patronize businesses that have gone just to plastic. If you don’t want my money, there is another similar business that does.

Just goes to show we would all get it eventually.

So tired of people trying to engineer society when Mother Nature always wins out in the end.

Groundhog Day | October 18, 2020 at 1:34 pm

““A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low,” The New York Times asked in July while lauding Merkel’s policies.”

Well, the death rate in Germany was indeed lower than in GB or Italy, because the British and Italian healthcare systems are (corrupt) public single-payer systems – while the German system is different: it is half public and half private, because most German Government employees are privately insured (with the German Government paying the expensive rates even after they retire). That’s why you have pretty decent healtcare, which state-mandated healthcare-insured people have access to as well. If there wouldn’t be private health insurance in Germany, it would be as bad as in GB, Ireland, Spain or Italy…

Since the Europeans consider Americans generally, and President Trump particularly, to be hopeless cretins, I wonder if they hope for a side effect of this lockdown stage 2 to be suppression of our own recovery. It’s just another reason to continue our policy of independence from the rest of the world until the Chinese and their disease are no longer a threat to us.
.

the number of new infections is increasing by leaps and bounds every day

To which I must ask, so what? Hospitals aren’t being overwhelmed and deaths aren’t spiking up in concert with the spike in infections.

Lockdown is directly responsible for the 2nd wave. Isolation weakens the immune system because its not busy fighting diseases. So where young or healthy people are able to fight off diseases normally and effectively, they get sick. It’s simple science, that’s why vaccines are intended to have the body’s natural immune system fight off inert versions of viruses. Vaccines are not drugs, they don’t kill off any viruses, they cause the body to fight of viruses.

A discussion of apples.

“A record rise in new cases,” “We are currently seeing a widespread increase in infections,” “the number of new infections is increasing by leaps and bounds every day,” “Germany recorded 7,830 new coronavirus infections in the past 24-hour period, a new record since the pandemic began,” “The number of cases was nearly 500 higher than on Friday and more than 1,500 higher than the prior infection peak recorded in March,” “entered quarantine on Thursday after one of her staffers tested positive for the virus,” “contracted the virus during a EU summit,” “health ministry reported more than 32,000 new confirmed cases of Covid-19” . . .

Very nice, somebody has a very sensitive test, and people are being tested in profusion.

But how many are sick? How many show even the slightest symptoms? Does all this measure the spread of a dangerous contagion, or does it merely measure the efficacy and popularity of a test?

We saw a similar pandemic of panic in the early days of Warmunism. A blizzard of data (either real or imaginary, via “computer models” of suspect validity) about temperatures in columns of air, none of which told us anything at all about the phenomenon of real interest—the climate; but it sure did sound scientific, and amateurs were impressed.

What establishes the seriousness of a disease? Sickness rates, death rates, hospitalization rates. Test results, though doubtless of great interest to professional epidemiologists, tell us nothing about those.

And now for the orange to compare to the apples—

“A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low,” The New York Times asked in July while lauding Merkel’s policies.

Test results vs. death rate. Apples and oranges.

Yesterday I saw a news item from Australia in which a news analyst expressed great puzzlement that infection (ie, test) results were very high, but death rates hadn’t budged. And he had nice graphs from various countries of death rates as a function of time. And while he appeared to be genuinely puzzled—that is, an honest reporter rather than a dedicated propagandist—he was obviously not a scientific man, or he’d be aware of the perils of confusing oranges for apples. The distinction easily explains his puzzle.

Freedom is nice. Don’t waste it sitting at home.