Merkel push for German lockdown blocked as death toll passes 100,000

Germany’s Covid-19 crisis continues to rock the nation with the grim news on Thursday that the total number of deaths has now surpassed 100,000.

The country’s new incoming coalition government is resisting a lockdown, for now, however.

Germany reported a massive number of new Covid cases on Thursday, with over 75,000 new infections in the last 24 hours (and up from 66,884 on Wednesday), while the death toll has now reached 100,119 after 351 more people died from the virus during the previous day.

Government officials have been watching rising cases with alarm for weeks now, and the country’s outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly pushed for a two-week lockdown during a meeting on Tuesday with the country’s incoming coalition government.

According to the Bild newspaper, the new government alliance of the left-leaning Social Democrats and Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats pushed back against the idea, preferring instead to wait and see whether tighter Covid restrictions announced last week would work to help lower infections.

While Merkel had proposed a lockdown, to begin on Thursday, which would have seen shops, bars and restaurants close, the idea was rejected by the incoming government who said it would have been interpreted by the public as a “bad political trick” by the old and new government, Bild reported Wednesday. 

After the coalition’s deal and policy ambitions were announced Wednesday, Scholz signaled that the Covid crisis was an immediate priority for the government. He begun a news conference announcing the coalition deal by saying that the virus situation in Germany was serious and that the country would expand its vaccination campaign, including mandating vaccines for some people.

“Vaccination is the way out of this pandemic. In institutions where vulnerable groups are cared for, we should make vaccination compulsory,” Scholz said, without specifying further details. 

Meanwhile, incoming Finance Minister Christian Lindner stated that Germans should avoid all unnecessary contact this winter “to preserve all of our health in this pandemic.”

Germany has already tightened Covid rules amid the latest fourth wave of cases in the country.

Many states in Germany have already restricted access to public spaces like bars, restaurants, movie theaters and museums under “2G rules,” restricting access to only those who are vaccinated — “geimpft” in German — or recovered, “genesen.” A number of…