Angela Merkel said anyone in Germany who has yet to be vaccinated against Covid-19 will have to show a negative test result to be allowed to go to work, as authorities scrambled to deal with a huge surge in new coronavirus infections.
“We are in the middle of the fourth wave, trying to deal with a dramatic level of infection in Germany,” the chancellor said, adding that it was essential to “put a brake on the exponential increase” in new infections.
Merkel and the leaders of Germany’s 16 federal states met on Thursday as the number of new infections in the country reached record highs. According to figures from the Robert Koch Institute, the country’s main public health agency, the number of new cases in the past 24 hours stood at 65,371.