BERLIN – Germany today recorded more than 50,000 deaths from the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, as public health officials expressed cautious optimism about a slowing infection rate.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) disease control centre said 859 people died from the virus in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of fatalities to 50,642.
“That is a distressing, incomprehensible number to me,” RKI chief Lothar Wieler told reporters.
Nevertheless, Wieler said he saw hopeful signs in the latest, lower figures on new infections that a partial lockdown introduced in November and tightened in December was starting to have the desired effect.
The RKI said it had registered 17,862 new cases since the previous day, bringing the total number of infections in the pandemic to more than 2.1 million.
Wieler said he saw a “slightly positive trend” in the numbers after several days in the last month with new infections above 20,000.
However he urged the government to maintain the current restrictions until Germany sees a “massive” drop in cases and deaths.
At the same press conference, Health Minister Jens Spahn called the figures “encouraging” but warned they were “still too high”.
He noted that several countries that had eased their lockdowns at the first sign of improvement “quickly saw a new flare-up”.
Reporting about 4,800 patients in intensive care, health officials said there was no evidence that the Christmas and New Year’s holidays under country-wide restrictions on gatherings had led to a spike in critical hospitalisations. – AFP, January 22, 2021
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