The German federal government has raised the bar for achieving what is known as herd immunity. “Our goal must be to achieve a quota of 95 percent, especially among the endangered groups,” said the parliamentary state secretary in the Ministry of Health, Sabine Dittmar, according to a preliminary report in the “Augsburger Allgemeine”.
At the beginning it was thought that a quota of 70 percent would be sufficient for herd immunity. Against the background of the numerous mutations, one now knows that this is not the case, said Dittmar.
Meanwhile, the corona numbers in Germany continued to rise. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported 55,889 new corona infections on Saturday. That is 29,497 more cases than on Saturday a week ago when 26,392 positive tests were reported. The RKI points out that fewer tests were carried out at the turn of the year and therefore probably fewer cases were reported.
The seven-day incidence rises to 335.9 from 303.4 the previous day. The value indicates how many people per 100,000 inhabitants have been infected with the corona virus in the past seven days. 268 other people died related to the virus. This increases the number of reported deaths to 113,900 within one day. In total, more than 7.47 million corona tests have so far been positive in Germany.