According to an Insa poll of 1,000 people published by Bild am Sonntag, 63 percent of residents in Germany would choose to don a mask to go the supermarket even though they are no longer required in most states.
Only 29 percent of respondents said they didn’t want to do this and eight percent of those questioned declined to answer.
Politicians are also split on whether it was right to end restrictions now.
FDP leader Christian Lindner defended the end of Covid-19 measures, telling Bild am Sonntag that restrictions on freedom were “no longer proportionate”.
However, he said that vaccination and Covid-19 tests should remain free.
“The pandemic is not over. That’s why, as Minister of Finance, I will ensure that there are still free tests and vaccinations available.”
But others felt the end of the measures – which expired overnight in most of Germany’s 16 states – had come too soon.
READ ALSO: The ‘hotspot’ states keeping Covid rules as restrictions end across rest of Germany
Chair of the CSU state group Alexander Dobrindt would have liked the mask mandate to have stayed in place, for example, for shopping.
“At a time when the number of infections is very high, it is premature to end almost all protective measures,” he said.
Infection levels have declined in the last few days but remain high. Data from the Robert Koch Institute showed that there were 1,457.9 new infections per 100,000 people on Sunday, down from 1,723.8 a week earlier.
And the head of the Marburger Bund doctors’ union, Susanne Johna, called for people to continue wearing masks indoors.
“Especially in supermarkets and restaurants, masks are still very important to contain infections,” she told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland newsroom on Saturday.
German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) is also in favour of continuing to wear masks in indoor public areas: “The risk of becoming infected has hardly ever been higher than it is now”.
On Deutschlandfunk, Lauterbach referred to the 200 to 300 people who are dying every day from in connection with Covid. “That is not acceptable. That’s one plane crash every day.”
Despite protests from several federal states, the legal basis for the two-week extension of Covid restrictions expired overnight on Saturday and, with it, measures like the ‘G’ Covid entry pass system to get into public places and the mask mandate in shops and restaurants for most of Germany.
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Is it just me, but the only answers the germans have to this flu 2.0. Is to keep doing what has not worked for the last two years. Insane.
But don’t worry there might be a new variant by next Thursday and we can lockdown back to safety again. Not that we are free or anything, as business are allowed to discriminate based on what you’re wearing. In the 30’s you were descriminated against if you wore a particular item on clothing. And now, in the 20’s your discriminated against if you don’t. The past doesn’t repeat itself. It ryhms.
So the thing that we were doing to bring down infections, has resulted in record infections, so to bring them down we need to keep doing that thing that has not worked? Trying to wrap my head around this logic.
‘Flatten the curve!’
‘Follow the science!’