The Robert Koch Institute for Disease Control and Prevention in Germany announced today that the total number of incurable infections with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the country exceeded the 40,000 mark. Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that the next few weeks will be the most difficult phase of the outbreak.
The Robert Koch Institute said 465 more people have died of the disease in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths since the outbreak began to 40,343.
Nearly 17,000 new cases have been diagnosed since the 9th, and so far more than 1.9 million people have been diagnosed in Germany.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an audio-visual talk broadcast every Saturday that the full impact of social events during Christmas and New Year’s on the outbreak has not yet been shown in the statistics.
Merkel warned Germans that the next few weeks will be the “toughest phase of the epidemic” so far, and that many doctors and health care workers will be working at full capacity.
The country currently has more than 5,000 confirmed patients in intensive care units, with more than 80 percent of intensive care unit beds occupied.
Germany, like other EU countries, began vaccinating its population at the end of December 2020 with a vaccine jointly developed by Pfizer (USA) and BioNTech (Germany).
So far, more than 500,000 people have been vaccinated.
Merkel acknowledged that the vaccination campaign is off to a slow start, “but the pace will pick up.”
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