COVID-19 pandemic in Germany

[13] A number of state premiers pressed for faster relaxation of restrictions, putting them at odds with Merkel, who favoured a more cautious approach,[14] a pattern that repeated itself later that year.

Death rates in nursing homes remained high until late January 2021[20] but dropped strongly in February, likely due to residents and workers at these facilities having been prioritised in the vaccination campaign.

[32] Unprecedentedly high infection numbers led Germany to reintroduce free coronavirus testing in November, a month after they had been phased out,[33] and to launch a booster campaign.

[34] Warnings of a "massive fifth wave" driven by Omicron in December[35] proved to be no exaggeration as daily case numbers rose up to over 200,000 by mid February 2022, and remained at a high level in March.

But until 24 March, the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance [de] (BBK) had never set up appropriate stores or had talks with manufacturers and suppliers to prepare for such a situation, was the criticism of some experts.

A man from Rhine-Neckar returning from a short ski holiday with mild cold symptoms checked himself in to the emergency department of the University Hospital Heidelberg and tested positive.

[89] Health Minister Melanie Huml reportedly offered her resignation to premier Soeder, whose decision to leave her in office was met with sharp criticism by the parliamentary opposition.

[92][93] Due to the number of occupied intensive care beds reaching 609 on 8 November 2021, thereby exceeding the threshold of 600, the Corona-Ampel (corona traffic light) jumped to red in the state, triggering a tightening of pandemic restrictions.

[97] On November 15, 2021, Berlin banned unvaccinated citizens from restaurants, bars, cinemas and other entertainment venues, and now require them to present a negative COVID test to travel by bus or train.

[98][99] In January 2022, a spokesman of the Berlin government told Reuters that public services including transportation, police and child care were reshuffling operations to cope with an increasing number of staff in quarantine.

[106] Mayor Rolf-Georg Köhler informed the public on 2 June that the cluster originated in Eid al-Fitr celebrations by several families on 23 May where social distancing rules had been ignored.

[143][144] On 26 February, a 41-year-old soldier who worked in Cologne-Wahn military airport and had attended a carnival event in Gangelt with the 47-year-old patient from North Rhine-Westphalia was admitted to Bundeswehr Central Hospital, Koblenz, the first case in Rhineland-Palatinate.

[164] On 8 January, the German Health Ministry announced that regulators of the European Medicines Agency had approved the extraction of six, instead of five, doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine from each vial, and that this practice would be immediately adopted in Germany.

In explaining the recommendation, which was more restrictive than that at EU level, STIKO head Thomas Mertens cited the concerns of von Kries, adding that very children fell ill with COVID-19 as opposed to older people.

[183] Health minister Spahn said on 22 September that unvaccinated workers who were forced to quarantine after returning from travels to high-risk areas would no longer receive governmental subsidies for lost income from 11 October at latest.

[46] On 25 January 2021, the Health Ministry announced that Germany had bought 200,000 doses of experimental antibody cocktails for €400 million, to be administered at university hospitals only, and to be used only on high-risk patients at an early stage of the illness.

[190] In a tweet on 21 May 2022, health minister Lauterbach expressed his satisfaction about new research results indicating the high efficacy of the drug, but said that more preparation was still needed to determine its "optimal use".

[197] In a press release from 29 April, the Federal Government predicted that gross domestic product to decline by 6.3 per cent in 2020, with the sharpest drop in economic output, and the peak in Kurzarbeit short-time working, occurring in the second quarter.

[200] On 3 June, the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA) announced that the jobless figure in Germany had risen in May to 2.813 million, a year-on-year increase of 577,000, bringing the unemployment rate to 6.1 per cent.

In his analysis, BA director Detlef Scheele stated that even though the coronavirus crisis had hit the labour market with unprecedented severity, it was coping reasonably well in his opinion.

Economists expected a rebounding of the economy in the third quarter due to the easing of coronavirus related restrictions, but saw the possibility of a second wave of infections hanging as a threat over those predictions.

[204] On 26 March, the Federal Constitutional Court stopped a German law for the roll-out of an aid package totalling €750 billion that had been agreed by the European Council in summer 2020.

[206] According to a study by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research whose results were published on 20 April 2021, private consumption had dropped in 2020 by 6.1 per cent, the largest amount in 70 years, translating to €1,250 per capita.

[227] In early March 2021, members of the German parliament Nikolas Löbel and Georg Nüßlein resigned from the ruling CDU/CSU party over a scandal that had broken about them having allegedly earned six-figure sums from brokering sales contracts for face masks.

[231] Over the weekend of 5 and 6 June, German weekly Der Spiegel reported that uncertified face masks from a burst of orders in early 2020 had been considered by the Health Ministry for distribution among the homeless and those with disabilities.

[232] Nevertheless, within less than a week, the controversy grew to be regarded as the main friction point in the ruling Grand coalition as the country was approaching the 2021 German federal election in late September.

The Ministry of Health of North Rhine-Westphalia advised against panic buying, especially of masks, medications and disinfectants, to leave them for those really in need, assuring there would be no shortage of supply even in the event of a quarantine.

[237] Apart from a common belief that the government measures were a strongly disproportionate diminishing of constitutional basic rights, the aims of the protesters varied widely: what was described as a "bizarre mix of people"[239] included conspiracy theorists, radical extremists, antisemites, football hooligans and anti-vaxxers[239] as well as "hippie moms" and advocates of alternative medicine.

The protest drew particular attention for the attempted storming of the Reichstag, which houses the German parliament, by several hundred people, some of whom were holding insignia from the Reichsbürger movement.

[248] As the third wave of the pandemic receded between April and June 2021, protests became smaller; politologist Josef Holnburger said to broadcaster MDR that a downward trend in followership of social media channels of the Querdenken movement had been observed by him and colleagues as early as November 2020, which they related to repeated failures of setting up large street demonstrations since that time.