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New crown rules: stricter December resolutions go into effect
07.11 am: Tighter contact restrictions in December, easing during Christmas: New wreath rules decided by the federal and state governments went into effect in most federal states on Tuesday. Restaurants, theaters and leisure facilities will be closed. Additionally, private meetings are now limited to a maximum of five people from your own household and another household. Children up to 14 years old are not counted here. In November, meetings with up to ten people from two households were still allowed.
One of the resolutions of December is that the partial blockade that is already in force will last until December 20. “We need another effort,” stressed Chancellor Angela Merkel last week after consultations with the prime minister.
The extension of the measures aims to avoid overloading hospitals. “The number of patients continues to increase, but not as much as two weeks ago. If it continues like this, the development of the clinics would be manageable, “said the president of the German Hospital Association Gerald Gass of the” Passauer Neue Presse “(Tuesday).
Spending on part-time work exceeding 20,000 million euros
6:20 am: The costs of short-time work as a result of the corona pandemic have passed the 20 billion euro mark. More than half of this was due to payments to employees who had to accept reduced wages due to the forced layoff, a spokesman for the Federal Employment Agency (BA) told the Reuters news agency. Around € 8.7 billion were paid to employers as reimbursement of social contributions. Last year, for economic reasons, spending on short-time hours amounted to 131 million euros at the end of November.
At the height of part-time work in May, nearly six million employees received part-time benefits. Since then, the numbers have been falling according to BA projections. The authority presented new calculations today with the announcement of the November labor market figures.
UN: Corona pandemic vastly increases global need for humanitarian aid
6:10 am: The United Nations estimates that around $ 35 million will be needed for humanitarian aid around the world over the next year. 235 million people are expected to need some form of emergency assistance, UN emergency aid coordinator Mark Lowcock said at the presentation of the UN annual report on the global humanitarian situation in Geneva on Tuesday. This corresponds to an increase of 40 percent compared to the current year. According to Lowcock, the reason is the corona pandemic.
The corona pandemic is disproportionately affecting those “already living on the razor’s edge,” the annual report says. It is “the bleakest and darkest outlook for humanitarian aid” the UN has formulated for a year to come, Lowcock said.
For the first time since the 1990s, the UN anticipates a global increase in poverty and a decrease in life expectancy. Added to this is the fear that the annual number of deaths from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria will double. “Most alarming” is the threat of a return to famine in several regions, Lowcock said.
According to UN estimates, the number of people affected by acute food insecurity could rise to 270 million people worldwide by the end of this year, which would be 82 percent more than before the start of the corona pandemic. . Yemen, South Sudan, Burkina Faso and northeastern Nigeria are already on the brink of famine, Lowcock said. Furthermore, Afghanistan and the Sahel area are “potentially very threatened”.
As in the previous year in Syria and Yemen, the UN rates the humanitarian situation as the most serious. Thus, only $ 6 billion would be needed to supply Syrians inside and outside the civil war country. The UN requests 3.5 billion dollars from donor states for the Yemeni population.
According to UN figures, the required sum of $ 35 billion would be enough to help 160 million particularly vulnerable people in 56 countries around the world. However, it is questionable whether the UN will be able to raise this sum. For this year it had already set a record amount of almost 29 billion for needed aid, but so far only 17 billion have been raised.
Lowcock said that while the amount requested for next year seems huge, it is small relative to the spending of industrialized countries rescuing their economies from the crown crisis. “The lives of many people are at stake, and the cost of protecting their lives is really very small compared to other challenges we face.”
Solidarity with those most affected by the crisis also warned the UN Secretary General, António Guterres: “Together we must mobilize our reserves and show solidarity on the side of the people who are in the darkest hour of their need.”
According to the study, Corona hits the labor market hard for people with disabilities
4.10 am: The crown crisis is hitting the labor market for people with disabilities hard. A total of almost 174,000 people with severe disabilities were unemployed in Germany in October, about 13 percent more than in the same month the previous year. This comes from the “Labor Inclusion Barometer” published Tuesday by Aktion Mensch and the “Handelsblatt Research Institute” (HRI).
The inclusion of people with severe disabilities in the labor market was delayed four years due to the pandemic, Aktion Mensch reported, speaking of a clear turnaround. “Since 2013, the labor market situation for people with disabilities has improved almost steadily,” reported HRI President Bert Rürup. But Corona had ruined the successes of the past few years in no time. “From March to April alone, the number of unemployed with severe disabilities increased by more than 10,000.”
According to the study, the Covid-19 pandemic is a huge challenge, especially for inclusion companies that employ a particularly high proportion of people with disabilities. Because many of these companies operate in sectors such as gastronomy, hotels and restaurants, which are particularly affected by the closing of March and the partial closing of November, as well as by the continuous restrictions on economic life.
The number of unemployed with disabilities rose more slowly than the overall unemployment rate, but the negative consequences of the corona pandemic are likely to last much longer for the severely disabled, Aktion Mensch warned. “Once people with disabilities have lost their jobs, it is much more difficult for them to find their way back to the primary labor market than people without disabilities,” said aid organization spokeswoman Christina Marx. On average, unemployed people with disabilities looked for a new job 100 days longer than people without disabilities.
According to the inclusion barometer, the largest increase in the number of unemployed among the disabled was recorded in Bavaria with 19.1 percent and in Hamburg with 18.9 percent.
The number of overburdened health authorities continues to rise
3.30 am: Despite the slight decrease in the number of new infections, according to one report, more health authorities are having difficulty tracing the contacts of people infected with corona. 60 out of 400 German health authorities reported bottlenecks to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) on Monday, as reported by the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”, citing an RKI spokeswoman.
43 offices – and therefore more than a tenth – reported difficulties in category 3, according to which “the implementation of protection measures against infections is no longer fully carried out due to capacity bottlenecks”. Another 17 health authorities said they would be overburdened for the foreseeable future.
Although the daily number of new infections has decreased slightly for about two and a half weeks, the number of overburdened health authorities continues to increase slightly. RKI spokeswoman Susanne Glasmacher told NOZ that the RKI had 21 reports of category 2 and 3 bottlenecks on October 21. There were 38 on October 30, 46 at the end of the first week of November, and 49 in mid-October.
Health authorities are obliged to inform state authorities if they lack personnel to protect against infection. The federal states, in turn, report this to the RKI. The RKI does not provide information on specific districts or cities.
Protection measures against infections mainly include contact person monitoring, which is considered a central element of corona containment, and in some cases also outbreak management or other infection protection tasks.
