Today's corona news in 60 seconds
+++ Berliners ratted out +++ Limiting protests +++ Probably no lockdown +++ the stats
Berlin-Every weekday at 11am come to the Berliner Zeitung English Edition for the latest corona/Covid-19 news at a glance.
🚥 First, the official corona stats for Berlin (tallied Sunday, 11 October)
🟢 R number: 1.29 (1.23 Saturday)
🔴 New infections per week: 61.3 / 100,000 inhabitants (53.6 Saturday)
🟢 Percentage of Covid-19 patients in intensive care: 3.1 per cent (No change)
Total number of corona deaths: 234 (No change)
Source: Berlin's coronavirus status page
The lowdown...
Snitches get stitches
A Berlin family in a vacation house in Brandenburg were visited by local police on Friday evening after a neighbour tattled on them for not having a required negative corona test before travelling to the state surrounding the capital. The cops didn't evict the family, a relase said, as they had small children who were already sleeping. Probably just a stern German talking-to, which is sometimes worse than eviction.
Dehoga, a lobbying assocation for restaurants and hotels, said it expects lawsuits this week challenging the regulations. States can forbid travellers from risk areas from staying in hotels or vacation homes without a negative corona test no older than 48 hours.
Just send your best protesters
Barbara Slowik, Berlin's top cop, wants to cap protests at 100 people to help dampen rising corona numbers. The events don't just crowd people from all areas of Berlin as well as outlying regions together, but police officers are also pulled from all over the country to provide security, she said, raising the spectre of tracking viruses all over the place. 1,054 protests were registered in September alone, with 700 having actually occurred.
Politicians say no lockdown for now, more restrictions
Helge Braun, Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff, told state broadcaster ARD that if corona numbers don't stabilise in the next 10 days, the government will have to further restrict travel and private parties, which he intimated were the main drivers of the second wave. He said politicians wanted to avoid a new lockdown if at all possible and said the above-mentioned prohibition on hotel stays was useless because hotels weren't hot spots. "It's solving a problem we don't have," he said.
In case you missed it...
Igor Levit is a refreshingly outspoken piano prodigy. He couldn't play a planned series of Beethoven sonatas because of the lockdown so he did them online from his living room instead. He explains it all in this extensive Q&A.
That's all for now folks. Have a healthy week!
Yours,
The Berliner Zeitung English team
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