Corona policy: new measures in autumn? Forget it!

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opinion Corona-Politics

New measures in autumn? Forget it!

“The Corona discussion ignores reality”

“Of course the numbers will go up,” says virologist Prof. Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit. However, that is not crucial. In his opinion, what could fall on our feet in autumn is not the obligation to wear masks, but a much more profound circumstance.

In the middle of summer, a debate is raging in Germany about compulsory masks and curfews in autumn. But the impression is deceptive: there is no longer a political majority for new measures. One party is decisive – and exceptionally not the FDP.

Dhe corona pandemic has left a traumatized society. This is shown by the fact that in Germany in the middle of summer a media war of nerves is raging over possible protective measures in autumn. Scaremongers and conspiracy theorists alike get their money’s worth: It seems as if they cannot bear the lightness of being that one feels on hot June days despite the war and crisis in Europe – and have to enter that labyrinthine world of compulsion and paranoia, hysteria and reset depression that has become almost second nature to Germans in two leaden lockdown years.

Obviously the mechanism at work here is what psychology calls “repetition compulsion”. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) peddles speculative death figures like an apocalyptic itinerant preacher instead of doing his job and taking care of the dysfunctional health system. Winfried Kretschmann (Greens) would like to come back “have everything, including the possibility of curfews”, as if he were a dictator in a banana republic and not Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg. And even a frightened milieu of corona critics, who have lost all trust in the liberal constitutional state, consider it a sealed thing that from now on mask requirements, contact restrictions and closures will characterize every winter.

For evidence and proportionality

That was the bad news. Here’s the good one: It’s ghosts that are being fought with. Because there has long been no political majority for general corona measures. After the FDP, after all the government faction, has made it very clear in recent weeks that it insists on the basic principles of evidence and proportionality, the opposition CDU parliamentary group in the Bundestag is now also clearly signaling that it is relying on personal responsibility and the protection of vulnerable groups. That shows one Statement by the Health Working Group of the CDU/CSU parliamentary groupbut it is also clear from background talks that WELT chief reporter Tim Röhn in political Berlin. A Bundestag majority for comprehensive restrictions on fundamental rights, which was no longer available when the Infection Protection Act expired in spring, is no longer in sight for autumn.

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Curfew at Cologne Central Station, April 2021

This is how reason prevails. Only the Greens and parts of the SPD still insist on a restrictive policy that has finally become obsolete. The best example of this is Portugal, whose “summer wave” served the German warning group as proof that Corona is “not over” – and which is now demonstrating that such waves that will accompany our lives in the future can no longer be countered with coercive measures must react.

Their damage has long been better documented than their benefit – from the serious economic problems, the extent of which is only now becoming apparent not only in the catering and travel industry, to the much more serious long-term psychological damage in children and young people.

That now, in addition to the FDP, the CDU is also calling for a corona course of personal responsibility and targeted protection, which has long been normal outside of the sometimes somewhat limited German horizon, that the Union faction is also calling for an enlightening “data collection on the immune status” in Germany, as they do Karl Lauterbach has probably not refused without reason – that can be seen as a clear signal. The time of politics fixated on Corona is over, no matter what Karl Lauterbach tells in his obligatory talk shows. At the latest when historical inflation and an energy crisis that threaten our very existence hit the country in autumn and winter, these symbolic political battles will finally fade away.

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