Europe

The German corona vaccination campaign has been overshadowed by an incident in the north of the country. There, eight employees of a retirement home were given an overdose of the vaccine.   According to Vorpommern-Rügen district authorities, health workers in the city of Stralsund were given five times the recommended dose of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine on Sunday. Four of them were taken to the hospital for comment after developing flu-like signs. "I deeply regret the incident. This separate case is due to individual errors. I hope that everyone involved will not experience serious side effects," district chief Stefan Kerth said in a statement. The incident comes as some German districts have said they will not use the corona vaccines from Pfizer and BioNTech that were disseminat...

The number of new corona infections detected in Germany in 24 hours has dropped slightly after days of nearly thirty thousand new infections.   The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German counterpart of the RIVM, reported 16,362 new cases on Monday morning. The RKI reported Friday and Saturday that the number of infections in Germany had increased by more than 29,000 and 28,000 new cases. The number of new infections reported on Monday is usually lower because less testing is done on weekends, and fewer test results are passed on. A total of 1,337,078 people in Germany have now become infected. The number of people who died as a result of Covid-19 increased by 188 to 21,975. Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Sunday that Germany would enter a stricter lockdown from next Wedne...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel would prefer to see the ski slopes in the Alpine countries closed due to the coronavirus.   However, she expects that it will be difficult to reach agreements on this, especially with neighbouring Austria. "The ski season is coming. We will try to coordinate European whether the ski areas remain closed," Merkel said in the German parliament on Thursday, where the corona measures were debated. French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte have already announced that they want to keep the slopes closed. Austria wants to open the ski areas under strict corona conditions. The country says it misses out on 800 million euros in income per week if there are no winter sports and then demands compensation from the European Union...

The number of new corona infections detected in the last 24 hours has skyrocketed in Germany to 18,633, reports the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German counterpart of RIVM.   On Tuesday, 13,554 new infections were reported. The number of new infections reported on Tuesday meant that a three-day decline in the number of new corona cases in Germany came to an end. The number of new cases fell by about 5,000 a day from about 23,000 on Saturday to about 16,000 on Sunday and about 11,000 on Monday. Now the number of new infections seems to be increasing at almost the same rate. The death toll in Germany ran fast in the past 24 hours with 410 deaths. The corona epidemic has now claimed the lives of 14,771 people in total, according to official figures.