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Saturday October 17, 2020
Berlin’s Neukölln district has the highest number of new infections nationwide in seven days. The health authorities are working to the limit. The district health council is not very optimistic that Neukölln can recover: they are “in absolute crisis mode”.
The health councilor in the Corona hotspot in Berlin’s Neukölln district believes that it is no longer possible to contain the virus, as in the summer in his district. “The fact that we can catch him again like the middle of the year, I don’t think so anymore,” said CDU politician Falko Liecke. “We are in absolute crisis mode.” Neukölln has the highest number of new infections in the entire country in seven days.
The district was already struggling with several crown buds in the summer. The main concern now is to protect at-risk groups, such as the elderly and chronically ill, for example, by restricting opportunities to visit nursing homes and nursing homes and by regularly testing staff there, Liecke said.
According to Liecke, there is only one explanation why the number of cases was so “sky high” in Neukölln of all places. However, he suspected a connection to the composition of the population: he referred, for example, to a large number of fun-oriented international youth, but also to educationally disadvantaged groups and people with language barriers. Berlin Health Senator Dilek Kalayci said that only slightly more than 10 percent of cases in Berlin can be attributed to outbreaks, while the source of the infection cannot be clearly identified in around 90 percent.
“We have a very wide range.” The senator explains the appearance of supposedly unclear individual cases, however, also with reports from official doctors, according to which the willingness of infected people to cooperate is generally decreasing. Kalayci also contradicted the notion that the current rise in infections in the city is largely due to increased testing.
The positive test rate in Berlin, after values of less than one percent in the summer, increased to about four percent. “In districts where a particularly large number of contact persons were tested, we are even 8 percent,” he said.
