Germany is set to mark 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, passing a bleak milestone that several of its neighbors crossed months ago but which Western Europe’s most populous nation had hoped to avoid. Resistance to getting the vaccination remains strong.
Some German politicians are suggesting it’s time to consider a vaccine mandate, either for specific professions or for the population as a whole. Austria took that step last week, announcing COVID-19 shots will become compulsory for all starting in February after seeing a similar reluctance to get vaccinated fuel fresh outbreaks and hospitalizations.
Merkel’s likely successor, current Finance Minister Olaf Scholz of the center-left Social Democrats, has refused to be drawn on whether he would back compulsory COVID-19 shots.Together with the environmentalist Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats, his party recently passed a law that replaces the existing legal foundations for pandemic restrictions with narrower measures, starting Wednesday.
Last week Saxony, an eastern state with the highest infection rates and where the Alternative for Germany is particularly strong, announced that crematoria would be allowed to operate on Sundays to cope with the higher-than-usual number of deaths. Germany boasted almost four times as many intensive care beds per capita as Italy had then, a factor that experts say wasSince January, Germany has had to cut its ICU capacity by 4,000 beds due to lack of staff, many of whom have quit because of the pressure they endured earlier in the pandemic.
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