Angela Merkel’s harsh speech on the dead …

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned tighter restrictions needed to curb rise in coronavirus cases and called on the people of his country to minimize their social activities. Germany announced its death toll from the pandemic in one day on Wednesday.

“There is too much contact between people … (..) If that means paying a daily price of 590 deaths, from my point of view, that is not something acceptable”, said the Chancellor, and gave as an example the food stalls set up at traditional Christmas fairs.

Merkel’s remarks come after the national center for disease control, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), reported that in the past 24 hours, 590 people have died from the coronavirus.

El RKI accounted for 20,815 new daily infections, with which Germany, which has 83 million inhabitants, already records nearly 1.22 million cases and 19,932 deaths in the pandemic.

With this panorama, Germany is stepping up prevention measures while new virus cases remain high and have even increased despite a partial halt in activities that began on November 2. Strict closures are expected to last until after Christmas.

“We are at a decisive phase in the fight against the pandemic,” Merkel told parliament on Wednesday.

“The numbers are at too high a level,” he added. As the German news portal Deutsche Welle reports, the chancellor called the growing number of people in need of intensive care and dying from coronavirus “very alarming”.

Merkel has always advocated strict sanitary measures, but in Germany it’s the country’s 16 state governments that are responsible for imposing and lifting the restrictions. The chancellor and governors meet periodically to coordinate the actions taken.

For the moment, restaurants, bars, sports and leisure facilities are closed, as well as hotels for tourists. Schools and non-essential stores remain open.

However, Merkel has asked state governments to consider closing schools before Christmas. “If we have too much contact before Christmas and it’s our last Christmas with our grandparents, then we will have been negligent”he warns.

Some state governors are already taking more stringent measures. The hardest-hit state of East Saxony will close schools and most shops from Monday to January 10.

Its southern neighbor, Bavaria, is introducing measures such as a nighttime curfew in the most affected areas and demanding more home education. and tighter border controls.

Germany has managed to avoid the high number of infections and deaths seen in other of its European neighbors and still has a much lower overall death rate than countries like the UK, France and the United Kingdom. Spain. Yet the current numbers and the increase in cases have sounded the alarm among leaders.