Germany will implement one of its strictest lockdowns since the start of the coronavirus pandemic through the Christmas holiday to stem the tide of coronavirus cases that has remained high in spite of softer lockdown measures.
The new lockdown measures, which will go into effect on Wednesday and last until Jan. 10, will require all nonessential businesses and all schools to close. The government will also limit Christmas Day gatherings from 10 to only five from two different households, according to CNN.
“If we have too many contacts now before Christmas, and that ends up making it the last Christmas with grandparents, then we will have failed. We should not do that,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a speech to the Bundestag, the German Parliament.
Despite a “soft” lockdown in November that closed bars, gyms, and theaters and slowed an acceleration in daily caseloads that matched the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, Germany has been unable to match other Western European countries such as Spain and Italy, which have seen reductions in new daily coronavirus cases, according to Our World in Data.
Germany’s seven-day rolling average caseload surpassed March levels in October and has since nearly quadrupled to more than 21,700 cases as of Dec. 12. However, those figures still fall below caseloads in the United States, which reported more than 219,000 coronavirus cases on Saturday alone, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The new restrictions will affect a number of traditional Christmas celebrations. Church gatherings will not be allowed to include singing, alcohol will be banned from all public spaces, and an annual New Year’s Eve fireworks event will be canceled. The German state Bavaria will include even stricter measures, implementing a 9 p.m. curfew.
German officials said the seven-day rolling average needs to drop to 50 cases per 100,000 before restrictions can be relaxed further. The current rolling average stands at 169 as of Sunday, according to Bloomberg.
“I have doubts that by Jan. 10 we will achieve our goal of reducing the number of new infections to 50 per 100,000 inhabitants in seven days with these measures,” Social Democratic Party health policy spokesman Karl Lauterbach told the Welt. “The next three months will easily be the toughest of the whole pandemic.”
