Germans Split Over Lifting of Lockdown

It’s an idea that Cologne-based lung specialist Elmar Storck further elucidates. “Let people live as social beings again and focus on high-risk patients, better protecting residents in senior homes, but at the same time let them receive visitors.” He says it’s inhuman to cut families apart from each other.

Psychiatrists also believe that many people are unable to cope with the conditions that have been imposed, with the threatened or actual loss of a job, with serious economic problems and with loneliness. Furthermore, they say, people are avoiding making the trip to the doctor’s office, thus leaving their problems unaddressed.

At the End of Their Ropes

Parents, too, are increasingly suffering as they have to juggle their own work with home schooling and childcare, especially single parents like Anita of Hamburg, who requested that her last name not be used.

Anita works part time in the health-care industry. Before the coronavirus, her 4-year-old son Maximilian’s grandmother helped babysit and he would frequently go to another child’s house to play sometimes. All that is gone now. She was so exhausted last Sunday that she drove to her mother’s house to get a breather in her yard. When the grandmother saw how tired her daughter was, she kept her grandson and told her daughter to go home and get some sleep.

Now Anita has a guilty conscience regarding her mom. She had adhered to the ban on personal contacts for weeks, visiting neither friends nor her child’s grandparents. But she just couldn’t do it any longer. That’s why she, too, is now pushing for a further loosening of the lockdown. “Otherwise, this is really going to affect people’s psyche.”

Judith K. has a different view, and she, too, has good arguments. The 52-year-old is a teacher at a special education school with a focus on intellectual development located near Cologne. The school has 168 young students. Currently, five of those students are being provided with emergency care at school because their parents are key workers. K. says she can already see how poorly they are able to comply with the prescribed preventative measures.

Although many schools in North Rhine-Westphalia are reopening, Judith K’s school remains closed, a fact that is angering an increasing number of parents. “Yesterday, one girl’s mother approached me and asked what’s wrong with me, saying I should finally open school again and that I’m just too lazy.” K. says she can understand such desperation. “Parents are at the end of their ropes,” she says. “They’re overwhelmed.” But out of concern for her students, she’s still hoping the school will remain closed for some time to come.

Article source: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germans-split-over-lifting-of-lockdown-a-f60074d5-1d64-4384-9aa5-bab01c4f8caa#ref=rss