The regulation comes into force on Thursday at midnight, as the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced on its website on Tuesday evening.
“With the widespread occurrence of the omicron variant, it is shown that the ability of this variant to cause a threatening disease is less severe compared to the previously predominant variants,” the RKI further explained.
For this reason, only regions where more dangerous variants are widespread would become high-risk areas. Most recently, 62 countries and regions were still considered high-risk areas, including most of Germany’s neighboring countries. They will all be taken off the list on Thursday. In the case of Austria, the municipalities of Mittelberg (Vorarlberg) and Jungholz (Tyrol) as well as the Tyrolean Riißtal were previously excluded from the high-risk classification, as these areas can only be reached by land from Germany.
At their most recent Corona summit in mid-February, the federal and state governments decided to revise the rules for classifying high-risk areas. The change in the classification criteria makes it easier for families in particular to travel, since children under the age of twelve are often not vaccinated and therefore cannot escape the prescribed quarantine.
So far, states or regions “with a particularly high number of cases” have been classified as high-risk areas – “Indication is regularly a seven-day incidence of well over 100” was the definition according to the RKI. Other “indications of a dangerous infection process” could also be used, such as a high hospitalization rate.
In the future, the classification “should be reserved for those areas in which there is a particularly high incidence in relation to the spread of a variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 with higher virulence (in particular pathogenic properties) compared to the omicron variant,” wrote the RKI on his website. Even though all previous high-risk classifications have now been lifted, the RKI warned that the situation “can continue to change at short notice” and that countries can be added to the list again.
In addition to high-risk areas, virus variant areas are also identified. These are regions in which a coronavirus variant “with worrying properties” that is not yet widespread in Germany is rampant. No region is currently considered a virus variant area. The classifications are made jointly by the German Ministries of Health, Foreign Affairs and Interior.
Source: Nachrichten
