COVID: How useful are restrictions as infection numbers soar? | Health - Hindustan Times
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COVID: How useful are restrictions as infection numbers soar?

By, Delhi
Jul 02, 2022 01:28 PM IST

Restrictions imposed quickly to combat the COVID pandemic have a measurable effect, according to an expert commission in Germany. The assessment comes at a time when infections again threaten to spiral out of control.

The expert panel gave good marks to measures imposed for containment of the COVID pandemic, aimed at stopping the spread of the disease at an early stage. The panel was commissioned by the federal government and its members included scientists specialized in medicine, law, ethics, economy, and public administration. After months of evaluating the wide range of research that has been published in the two and a half years since the outbreak of the pandemic, they found the wearing of medical masks (FFP2/N95) have been an especially effective measure to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

As more people fall ill with COVID this summer, emergency and rescue services are suffering from staffing shortage. (Jens Büttner/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa/picture alliance )
As more people fall ill with COVID this summer, emergency and rescue services are suffering from staffing shortage. (Jens Büttner/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa/picture alliance )

"Since the transmission of the coronavirus is incomparably stronger indoors than outdoors, a mask requirement should be limited to indoor areas and places with a higher risk of infection," the report said.

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It said lockdowns made sense, especially at the beginning of a pandemic, to reduce transmission as much as possible. "When only a few people are infected, lockdown measures have a much stronger effect. The longer a lockdown lasts, fewer people will be willing to comply with restrictions and this will 'reduce the effectiveness.'"

For months, Germany limited access to shops and restaurants to people who had been fully vaccinated or had recently recovered from a COVID infection. According to the expert commission, these so-called 2G/3G rules were effective in the first weeks after vaccination or recovery. However, protection against infection decreases significantly over time.

School closures and mental health

School closures have been a particularly controversial measure over the past two years. The expert panel does not have enough data to allow a final assessment of their effectiveness "despite biological plausibility and numerous studies." The panel mentioned the need for more studies on the detrimental effect of school closures and other shutdowns on mental health, suggesting measures to mitigate the long-term negative effect.

The experts urged the development of a comprehensive public health system, bundling data, and developing a strategy for nationwide protective measures that would be applicable in every epidemic situation.

The commission's findings are to serve as a basis for further legislation.

But the Green Party's health spokesman Janosch Dahmen said the findings were of limited significance, as they were "by no means a conclusive assessment of the effectiveness of corona protection measures."

"The absence of evidence on efficacy is not evidence for the absence of efficacy," Dahmen told the news agency dpa. "The informative value of the report is therefore limited."

Staff shortages in emergency services

With infections rising, there is already a shortage of staff in many areas of public service. It 's affecting the postal services, public transport, air traffic and even emergency services.

Ambulance driver Tobias Thiele works in the western Rhine-Main region near Germany's largest airport, Frankfurt. He says that during his recent night shift, one out of every two calls was for a COVID

emergency. "For months we've been warning about the collapse in emergency rescue services, and now it's here," Thiele says.

Germany prides itself on the fact that help is at hand here within the shortest possible time — whether for a heart attack, stroke, accident, or fire. But COVID infection numbers are also on the rise among emergency room and rescue staff.

Add to it a high rate of sick leave among emergency rescue workers in Germany and the vacation season and the country sector is now facing a serious staff crunch. Across Germany, "ambulances could not be manned every night because of a lack of personnel," says paramedic Thiele.

That's also because after each deployment, an ambulance must be cleaned and disinfected, which takes up valuable time and labour. Only after this intensive cleaning can the paramedics go out again.

After almost two and a half years of fighting the pandemic, rescue workers are exhausted.

Most recently, in Berlin, the fire department issued a warning that at times there isn't a single ambulance available due to staff shortages as more and more rescue workers call in sick. The Berlin Fire Department says there have been around 170 days on which only one ambulance was available for the whole of Berlin, if at all.

COVID restrictions once again?

A "cascade of COVID-related events" is what pandemic modeler and complexity researcher Dirk Brockmann of Berlin's Humboldt University predicted last winter when the first wave of infections with the Omicron variant began.

Now, most COVID protection measures have been scrapped and face masks are no longer mandatory in public places, apart from public transport.

"The infection rates are exploding," Brockmann told DW, although many of them no longer even appear in the statistics. "The number of unreported cases is high," he said because many COVID sufferers no longer bother to get a PCR test and simply stay at home until they feel better. So Germany is flying blind.

This week, the government also abolished the free COVID rapid tests. They now cost €3 ($3.15). That is expected to discourage even more people from getting tested.

Physics Professor Brockmann says that in his view, there is already "a lot of virus floating around in the room." So infection numbers continue to rise, and along with them COVID hospital admissions.

The basis for new restrictive measures would be a new infection protection law. But the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP), the smallest member of Germany's coalition government, is opposed to legislation restricting personal freedoms.

There is not much time for new legislation: Next week, the German parliament will convene for the last time before its summer break. And when they return, infections and hospital admissions will be rising again in the fall, as more people meet indoors again during the cold season.

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