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COVID-19 RULES

‘Stage zero’: North Rhine-Westphalia to scrap all contact restrictions on Friday

Clubs, sporting events and festivals will be permitted sooner than planned in North Rhine-Westphalia, thanks to many regions of the populous state seeing consistently low Covid infection rates.

Published: 8 July 2021 12:26 CEST
'Stage zero': North Rhine-Westphalia to scrap all contact restrictions on Friday
Crowds dance at a music festival in Dortmund back in 2016. Dortmund is one of the North Rhine-Westphalian cities where social restrictions will be relaxed. Photo: picture alliance / dpa-tmn | André Hainke

From Friday, July 9th, people in most regions of North Rhine-Westphalia will no longer face any contact restrictions and can enjoy major events like street festivals and sports tournaments with up to 25,000 attendees, state health minister Karl-Josef Laumann (CDU) confirmed on Wednesday. 

READ ALSO: German football fans get green light to return to stadiums next season

In addition, keeping the recommended 1.5m distance from one another when meeting friends in open-air spaces will become “a recommendation” rather than an obligation.

At big private events, masks and social distancing are now no longer required, but “recommended” – though attendees will have to show a negative test or proof of vaccination/recovery. 

However, masks will still have to be worn on public transport and in shops, taxis, schools and doctors’ surgeries, Laumann said. 

People who work in close contact with customers, such as hairdressers or waiters, will also have to continue to wear a mask, or present a negative test ahead of their shift. 

In addition, festivals – including town and village fests, as well as traditional shooting festivals, will be permitted if both the national incidence and incidence in the municipality remains below 10.

‘A return to normality’

The measures are being implemented as the final phase in a four-step plan for the re-opening public life.

As infection rates fell below 100 – the threshold for the ’emergency break’ – the state has been counting down from three to zero as it relaxes its rules.

Now, the last phase is coming into force sooner than expected in light of the low Covid-19 infection rates in several parts of the state.

This phase – termed ‘Opening Stage Zero’ – will automatically apply to all regions of the state that have had a 7-day incidence of less than 10 new infections per 100,000 people.

The means that cities like Duisburg, Essen, Bonn, Paderborn, Münster, Dortmund and Bielefeld will all have their restrictions relaxed from Friday. 

However, Cologne and Dusseldorf – where the 7-day incidence remains above 10 but below 35 – will remain in ‘Opening Stage 1’, where tighter restrictions are required. 

“The new Corona Protection Ordinance takes into account the sustained positive developments in all relevant pandemic figures in recent weeks. For many areas of life, it means the return to normality,” said Laumann. 

“However, we open with a sense of proportion and have set up a safety net to which we will fall back on in the event of an increasing incidence. In this way we can react quickly to another increase in the number of infections.”

Lauterbach: ‘The timing surprised me’

Not everyone was pleased to hear about the eased restrictions, however. 

Shortly after the liberalised rules were announced, Social Democratic Party politician and high profile health expert Karl Lauterbach voiced criticisms of the new freedoms, saying he believed re-opening public life at this stage was premature.

“We are in a phase in which the number of cases is rising again and vaccination progress is slowing,” he told regional radio station WRD 2. “The timing of the easing surprised me, I would have found a later point in time.” 

READ ALSO:

On the national level, the 7-day incidence has crept up slightly over two days, rising from 4.9 on Tuesday to 5.2 on Thursday. 

Experts are concerned this could be signs of a stagnating or upward trend.  

Member comments

  1. I don’t get it.

    We have to wear masks in a supermarket, a shop, a petrol station, on a main street/pedestrian zone etc. but hoards of potentially virus carrying people can party it up in clubs, at sporting events and festivals?

    Having a negative test means nothing.

    On your way to the testing station you could be infected (and standing outside chatting with others with no masks or social distancing as you await you result….I’ve seen this so often) and then you still provide a negative test because the test has not registered your recent infection.

    And then so many people travelling at the moment….

    It is all becoming a huge joke now.

    1. Totally agree. And they say “People are not getting vaccinated, we need to persuade them” and the next moment they open up everything and only a test is needed. madness.

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COVID-19 RULES

End of the pandemic? What the expiry of Sweden’s Covid laws really means

With the expiry of Sweden's two temporary Covid-19 laws, the downgrading of the virus's threat classification, and the end of the last travel restrictions, April, officially at least, marks the end of the pandemic. We explain what it means.

Published: 1 April 2022 13:07 CEST
End of the pandemic? What the expiry of Sweden's Covid laws really means

What are the two laws which expire on April 1st? 

Sweden’s parliament voted last week to let the two temporary laws put in place to battle the Covid-19 pandemic expire on April 1st.

The first law is the so-called Covid-19 law, or “the law on special restrictions to limit the spread of the Covid-19 illness”, which was used during the pandemic to temporarily empower the authorities to limit the number of visitors to shops, gyms, and sports facilities. It also gave the government power to limit the number of people who could gather in public places like parks and beaches. 

The second law was the “law on temporary restrictions at serving places”. This gave the authorities, among other things, the power to limit opening times, and force bars and restaurants to only serve seated customers.  

What impact will their expiry have? 

The immediate impact on life in Sweden will be close to zero, as the restrictions imposed on the back of these two laws were lifted months ago. But it does means that if the government does end up wanting to bring back these infection control measures, it will have to pass new versions of the laws before doing so. 

How is the classification of Covid-19 changing? 

The government decided at the start of February that it would stop classifying Covid-19 both as a “critical threat to society” and “a disease that’s dangerous to the public” on April 1st.

These classifications empowered the government under the infectious diseases law that existed in Sweden before the pandemic to impose health checks on inbound passengers, place people in quarantine, and ban people from entering certain areas, among other measures. 

What impact will this change have? 

Now Covid-19 is no longer classified as “a disease that’s dangerous to the public”, or an allmänfarlig sjukdom, people who suspect they have caught the virus, are no longer expected to visit a doctor or get tested, and they cannot be ordered to get tested by a court on the recommendation of an infectious diseases doctor. People with the virus can also no longer be required to aid with contact tracing or to go into quarantine. 

Now Covid-19 is no longer classified as “a critical threat to society”, or samhällsfarlig, the government can no longer order health checks at border posts, quarantine, or ban people from certain areas. 

The end of Sweden’s last remaining Covid-19 travel restrictions

Sweden’s last remaining travel restriction, the entry ban for non-EU arrivals, expired on March 31st.  This means that from April 1st, Sweden’s travel rules return to how they were before the Covid-19 pandemic began. 

No one will be required to show a vaccination or test certificate to enter the country, and no one will be barred from entering the country because their home country or departure country is not deemed to have a sufficiently good vaccination program or infection control measures. 

Does that mean the pandemic is over? 

Not as such. Infection rates are actually rising across Europe on the back of yet another version of the omicron variant. 

“There is still a pandemic going on and we all need to make sure that we live with it in a balanced way,” the Public Health Agency’s director-general, Karin Tegmark Wisell, told SVT. 

Her colleague Sara Byfors told TT that this included following the “fundamental recommendation to stay home if you are sick, so you don’t spread Covid-19 or any other diseases”. 

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