Two days later, more of the same. Only this time, Gottschalk was claiming that the statistical risk of infection in a stadium is zero. Just hours later, Gottschalk found himself sitting in front of the press again, but this time he had to explain that the match would be played in an empty stadium after all. He said the risks were minimal, but that the Robert Koch Institute had issued a new risk assessment for the Alsace region, which is also home to a number of FC Basel fans.
In Hannover, Hauke Jagau, the regional president responsible for the decision, said on Monday that a closer look would be taken at the thousands of visitors planning to attend the James Blunt concert in the TUI Arena three days later. The attendees were coming from close by, and not from risk regions, he argued. Health Minister Carola Reimann took a similar position. She argued that the virus wasn’t even circulating in Lower Saxony yet. Then the concert was cancelled after all.
This kind of reticence continued across the country until the middle of the week. Kai Klose, the social minister in the central German state of Hesse, which had 30 known cases on Monday, claimed that the situation in the state could not be compared to the one in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), which by that point had 500 confirmed cases. The governor of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, Malu Dreyer, said it did make any sense for “some person in Berlin to make stipulations that apply down to the smallest village.”
But by that point, others had already begun retreating, and then the states fell like dominoes. The first to drop was North Rhine-Westphalia Health Minister Karl-Josef Laumann on Sunday evening, who announced on a talk show that, for now, Bundesliga games would no longer be played in front of fans in his state. Then came Bavaria on Monday: No more events with more than 1,000 attendees. On Tuesday, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia and Bremen followed suit. Under pressure from Spahn’s tweet, they all suddenly realized that they could easily implement quite a few measures.
Then came Saxony on Wednesday, one day after an RB Leipzig game. The first event to be postponed was the 61st Congress of the German Society for Pneumology and Respiratory Medicine in Leipzig, which was to gather precisely the doctors needed to take care of corona patients.
Growing Pressure
Other states, however, once again made it clear that they didn’t approve of the overall direction of things, and decided to limit their measures to non-binding recommendations to cancel events with more than 1,000 visitors. This included Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, which also suggested that this limit only be implemented for indoor spaces, not for outdoor gatherings. Governor Dreyer grumbled that the number 1,000 had been “plucked” out of the air and that it was not scientifically justified. She argued that, for many events in closed spaces, the figure was much too high, while more visitors could safely attend events outdoors.
But there was enormous pressure on the states to agree on a plan of action by Thursday at the latest, when governors were scheduled to meet with Chancellor Merkel. Even before the group separated again, Hesse and Hamburg announced that they were also implementing a 1,000-person limit. That evening, the chancellor explained that the federal and state governments had agreed not only to cancel events with more than 1,000 participants, but also to call off all non-essential gatherings with smaller numbers of participants. Bavarian Governor Marcus Söder specified that “essential” meant legally essential, infrastructurally essential and economically essential. Everything else, he said, should not take place. The measures were to be implemented for four to five weeks, for now.
Ultimately, they were also under pressure from their own health authorities, who wanted clarity, and from event organizers, who didn’t want to be left hanging with costs. Cancelling an event was hard enough. But additional requests for compensation from artists and ticket buyers would have been even worse. As long as authorities were only recommending that events be cancelled, the event-organizers were trapped “on the fence,” says Tobias Lerch, a lawyer from the northern German city of Celle. It is possible that, in such cases, the organizer would have to pay the artists and for the space, and also return money to ticket-holders.
If the ban is mandatory, things might be different. The situation would potentially qualify as a force majeure, in which case they might be entitled to compensation. According to Hamburg administrative lawyer Sigrid Wienhues, this would probably not be based directly on the Protection Against Infection Act, “but on general regulatory law.” The states would then have to pay, which could be expensive.
Even Nuclear Protests Are Banned
In at least one area, however, the coronavirus will save the government a lot of money. In the first week of April, a date that had previously been secret, a transport carrying nuclear waste from the British reprocessing plant in Sellafield was set to arrive at the Biblis nuclear power plant in Hesse. It was to be the first of four planned deliveries from English and French facilities between now and 2024.
But the German Federal Police would have had to protect the train route with 600 officers. Officials in Berlin were concerned that such a large number of officers in a contained area could lead to mass infections on the force. Even without the nuclear transport, the German Federal Police had reported 135 potential infections among its ranks by the start of the week, as well as three confirmed cases.
Then came a decision by Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to cancel the operation. A memo by Romann, the head of the German Federal Police, said that the transport was “as of immediately cancelled” and that the deployment “could not be authorized” given the current spread of the coronavirus. In the midst of a pandemic, it turns out, even anti-nuclear protests are considered public events with more than 1,000 people.
By Matthias Bartsch, Annette Bruhns, Jürgen Dahlkamp, Michael Fröhlingsdorf, Hubert Gude, Dietmar Hipp, Julia Jüttner, Veit Medick, Lydia Rosenfelder, Jonas Schaible, Cornelia Schmergal, Ansgar Siemens, Lukas Stern, Steffen Winter
Icon: Der Spiegel
Article source: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-germany-s-piecemeal-response-to-corona-a-f376b3f9-625f-4a6a-8e7d-04bd48be20b2#ref=rss