Quarantine for travelers returning from high-risk areas | NDR.de – news

Status: December 18, 2020 5:45 pm

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania wants to introduce a quarantine for travelers returning from high-risk areas of the German crown. These are regions with an incidence value greater than 200. Mutual visits within the family nucleus are excluded.

The Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state government decided on Friday in a special session. Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig (SPD) announced an increase in controls at state borders. Mecklenburgers and West Pomeranians returning from a high-risk German area must be quarantined for ten days, which can be shortened by two corona negative tests in five days, unless they have visited their nuclear family. Returnees from risk areas abroad must always remain in quarantine.

Criticism from the ranks of the CDU

Schwesig said that mobility in particular is a driver of the pandemic. He made an urgent appeal to citizens to avoid reunions within the family as much as possible. Four members of the state parliament from the ranks of the co-ruling CDU criticized the new regulation as “disproportionate interference with the fundamental right to freedom of movement.” It is a ban on traveling and, above all, on meeting people without family who want to visit their friends on vacation. “Thirty years after German reunification, this is a devastating sign,” said Sebastian Ehlers, Matthias Manthei, Daniel Peters and Marc Reinhardt MEPs.

Ombudsman also skeptical

When asked, Schwesig stated that the new crown regulation had been decided “jointly” in the SPD / CDU cabinet. Criticism of the project came in advance from the country’s ombudsman, Matthias Crone. It considers that a new special route in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is legally very difficult. The opposition Left Party also criticized Schwesig’s regulation. It is incomprehensible that Schwesig still distinguishes between high-risk areas in other federal states and his own state in his considerations, said the leader of the parliamentary group Simone Oldenburg. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has long lost the status of lower rates of new infections. Therefore, it cannot be measured with a double standard. Nationally, the incidence value for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Friday was 97.4 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants in the last seven days.