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Housing bans as a means of fighting pandemics have come under massive criticism. Berlin wants to put the issue on the agenda during consultations with the Chancellor on Wednesday. Only Chancellor Helge Braun defends the concept.
The wave of criticism of accommodation bans in Germany continues to mount. Berlin’s ruling mayor, Michael Müller, complained in Monday’s “Tagesspiegel” that these bans created “one thing above all: confusion and misunderstanding.” According to the newspaper, Müller wants to put the accommodation bans on Wednesday at the federal-state conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The German Association of Cities also called for an end to these bans, but Chancellery Minister Helge Braun defended them. The accommodation ban for travelers from German corona risk areas is a “real emergency measure,” Braun said in the ARD. Many federal states are concerned that visitors to cities with a high number of infections are carrying the virus to their vacation areas. The most important objective of the crown policy is that the productive economy continues and that schools and kindergartens remain open, emphasized the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “That is why we have to be a little stricter where the chains of contagion mainly extend , that is to say, in the celebrations and unfortunately also in the trips.
“Unfortunately without success”
Müller called the accommodation bans, however, “neither timely nor explainable.” Despite the sharp increase in the number of corona infections in Berlin, he turned against one-sided guilt in the direction of the capital. “All the big cities have this problem in common, nobody here can take care of himself”, said the mayor of the government. “It is important to me that we are together.”
Berlin is one of the main German cities whose residents are prohibited from staying in various federal states because the number of new coronavirus infections in these cities has risen to more than 50 per 100,000 inhabitants in seven days. Bremen, Frankfurt am Main, Cologne and, more recently, Essen and Stuttgart also became risk areas when this threshold was exceeded.
However, SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach also appealed to the Chancellor to “pick up” the accommodation bans at the upcoming exchange conference with state leaders on Wednesday. This measure “unfortunately was not successful,” he said in the ARD. The accommodation of travelers in Germany has so far contributed little to the new cases of infection: these bans thus solve “a problem that does not even exist”.
“There is no evidence that hotels are access points”
The president of the German Association of Cities, Burkhard Jung, also said that the accommodation bans “were not well thought out, you will have to get back to it.” “There is no evidence that hotels or bus and train traffic are hotspots,” the SPD politician and mayor of Leipzig emphasized in the newspapers of the Funke media group. The criteria for all measures should be that they “bring something to protect against infection”.
The opposition in the Bundestag also rejects the accommodation bans. “I feel that the general restriction on freedom of movement within Germany is disproportionate,” said FDP party and faction leader Christian Lindner of the newspaper “Die Welt”. Just living in one of the so-called risk areas does not immediately turn cautious people into a risk. The classification of the risk areas themselves must also be done “on the basis of more parameters in addition to the number of new infections.”
The leader of the left-wing parliamentary group, Dietmar Bartsch, called the accommodation bans “illogical”. For example, it is forbidden to travel from Berlin to Brandenburg, but not the other way around. In the current situation, “there is no need for blind actionism, but clarity and reliability,” Bartsch warned in the “Welt.” The deputy leader of the AfD parliamentary group, Sebastian Munzenmaier, criticized the accommodation bans as a “grave violation of the fundamental rights of all travelers and hoteliers.” Therefore, he called for the bans to be “lifted with immediate effect.”
