Chancellor Angela Merkel has bowed to pressure to lift lockdown restrictions as Germany emerges from the first wave of the outbreak.
Merkel announced this afternoon that pupils will return to school from 4 May and that some shops will be allowed to reopen next week. “We need to understand that we will need to live with the virus as long as there is no medication or vaccine,” Merkel said.
The move comes as Germany appears to have weathered the outbreak considerably better than many other European nations of a comparable size. The Robert Koch Institute has recorded 3,254 deaths in Germany, around a quarter of the number reported in the UK.
The New Statesman’s international editor Jeremy Cliffe wrote about why Germany and Austria’s coronavirus death rates are so low last month. Read the article here.
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