It was already foreseeable: The lockdown is not expected to end on January 31. Chancellor Merkel and Baden-Württemberg's Prime Minister Kretschmann are pushing to move up the planned talks on an extension.
Kretschmann also wants to determine stricter regulations "as a precaution."
What that means exactly is not named, but the direction is clear. "If this gets really out of hand, as we see in London or something, and if the health care system collapses, then you have to make drastic curfews," says the head of the Baden-Württemberg government.
Of course, he doesn't say a word about the reasons for a possible collapse of the healthcare system, nor about how parents and children should deal with an additionally tightened lockdown. According to Kretschmann, opening schools and kindergartens is out of the question.
Anyone who has spoken to students in recent days will almost always hear the same thing: Online lessons don't work, the servers are overloaded. This seems to have come as a complete surprise to Stuttgart, even though it was no secret that there would be no face-to-face classes after the Christmas vacations. It was also clear that there would be a second wave of Corona and that the massive shortage of staff in the broken health system would lead to problems. But what was done to solve these problems?
Once again, we are the ones who have to pay for it. As if the current curfew were not enough, it is now to be tightened even further and once again the rulers are trying to pass the buck to us. Kretschmann's colleague Manfred Lucha, for example, puts it this way: "Contact restrictions and hygiene regulations were often no longer followed in private, which is why we still have a high rate of infections at home." So it is supposedly us who are to blame for not having complied with the measures, some of which are completely outrageous, and certainly not the government or the fact we still have to work no matter the pandemic.