Germany expected to tighten borders to control spread of Covid variants

The German government is expected to announce tighter border controls after warnings from leading virologists that the move is vital to control the spread in the country of more contagious variants of Covid-19.

Angela Merkel, the chancellor, is widely reported to have told a meeting of her CDU party colleagues that air travel in particular needed to be restricted “to the extent that you simply can’t get anywhere any more”.

The interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said in an interview with the tabloid Bild that the danger posed by the recent Covid mutations, particularly B117 which was first detected in the UK, “required dramatic measures”.

He said: “The threat posed by coronavirus mutations demands from us that we also examine the more drastic measures and discuss them, including much more thorough border controls, particularly in those areas bordering high-risk zones, as well as the reduction of air travel to Germany to more or less zero, just like Israel is doing right now, in order to prevent the introduction of the virus mutations.”

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The German government is coming under increasing pressure to act, from the virologists and epidemiologists advising them, with Belgium being looked to as an outrider after it closed its borders to all but essential traffic on Wednesday. The Belgian ban will be in place initially until 1 March, and puts an end to all holiday and leisure travel. Law enforcement agencies are to carry out rigorous checks on roads, at airports, ports and railways. Excluded from the ban are goods transports, visits to marital partners or cohabitants, travel for reasons of work or study as well as to attend funerals of close relatives.

Sandra Ciesek, professor of virology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, has led the call for a Europe-wide ruling on borders: “We must try to delay the spread of the variants in Germany. That can only function if it’s Europe-wide, because we are not living isolated on an island,” she said in a weekly podcast on the radio station NDR.

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Being at the heart of Europe, surrounded by nine countries, Germany is particularly vulnerable to the cross-border spread of the virus. But politically and morally, closing the borders has been seen as off the table by decision-makers throughout much of the crisis, a stance that has its roots in Germany’s longstanding commitment to an open Europe. The current debate has echoes of the 2015 refugee crisis, when Merkel said it was a moral necessity to keep the borders open to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who came to Germany.

The 506 mile (815 km) Czech border is seen as a particular weak point in Germany’s attempts to control the virus. The Czech Republic’s deaths from coronavirus are now among the highest in the world and almost a tenth of the population is known to have been infected. The B117 variant is known to be spreading across the country. Since Monday, the 35,000 Czechs who commute to Germany for work on a regular basis, from medical staff to cleaners, will have to present a new negative test every 48 hours before they are allowed to enter Germany. Industry bosses have complained the rule amounts to a border closure. Long queues have reportedly formed at the border of those waiting to be tested, leading to anger and frustration.

Christian Drosten, head of virology at the Charité teaching hospital in Berlin, said plans for tighter travel restrictions “make sense from a scientific perspective”. He added: “The more vigorously the brakes are put on the spread of the coronavirus in the country, the more important it is to look at what is being introduced from outside,” he told the broadcaster ARD.

But the pro-business liberal FDP has led the calls for a rethink, saying instead of introducing travel restrictions, the national effort should be focused on vaccinating as many Germans as possible. By Tuesday lunchtime just over 1.672 million Germans had received a jab, compared with about 7 million people in the UK.

“Flight and travel bans don’t help at a time like this … rather much faster vaccination,” said Wolfgang Kubicki, deputy leader of the FDP, in an interview with the Funke Mediengruppe. “Vaccines are the most reliable and only way out of this pandemic,” he said, accusing the government of “replacing real solutions with tokenism”.