Germany closes borders to stop the new …

Germany this Sunday closed a large part of its border controls with the Czech Republic and Austria in order to contain the new variants of covid-19. Only German citizens or those who have a fixed residence in the country, as well as transnational workers, healthcare personnel and freight carriers, can enter the country through these borders.

To guarantee checks, more than a thousand police officers have already been mobilized. The Deutsche Bahn railway company suspended connections to these areas and on Sunday morning, the police carried out arrival checks at Frankfurt airport. The German government has imposed the restrictions fearing a new wave of infections of the British and South African variants of the virus.

The European Union does not agree with these limits because it fears that, as happened last spring, each country in the bloc is looking at each other to try to stop the pandemic. “I can understand the fear of coronavirus mutations, but the virus won’t stop with closed borders “, deplored the European Commissioner for Health on Sunday, Stella Kyriakides.

For his part, the Minister of the Interior of Austria, Karl Nehammer, found “absolutely unacceptable” that drivers were prohibited from using a shortcut across Germany travel from one region of Austria to another.