BERLIN (LifeSiteNews) — Freedom from COVID restrictions will not be returning to Germany this month.
Although multiple news outlets are reporting that Germany will be lifting its COVID measures on March 20, in reality face coverings will still be mandatory in various places, schoolchildren will still be subject to compulsory testing, and local governments will still be allowed to restrict the freedoms of their population in a host of other ways.
Since the German government announced plans to lift all COVID restrictions on March 20, German lawmakers have been debating for weeks as to whether some measures should be kept after all.
A draft law put together by Justice Minister Marco Buschmann and Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has been agreed upon. It still imposes heavy nationwide restrictions such as mask and testing requirements on schools, public transportion, hospitals, and care homes, while also allowing individual states to impose even more restrictions of their own if they’re deemed “hot spots” of infection.
The restrictions that individual states can still decide to adopt include the so-called 2G and 3G rules, which require people to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 (or a negative COVID test in the case of the 3G rule) in order to gain access to certain premises such as restaurants, cafés, cinemas, and museums.
This is a far cry from the complete lifting of restrictions announced by many mainstream media news outlets in their headlines.
German lawmakers are justifying their decision to keep the restrictions by saying that the new legislation should provide “some basic protection” against potential “future waves” of infection and spikes in COVID cases that would need to be managed at local level.
In an interview with German television channel ZDF, Buschmann described the draft law as “the ideal compromise” and said he hopes it will enable the government “on the one hand to get as much normality as possible for citizens and on the other hand to be able to act if there is actually a concrete dangerous situation.”
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach also defended the draft in an interview with ZDF Wednesday morning, arguing than the government never planned to “re-open everything.” The health minister opined that the draft law provides the means for the states to “react immediately to new outbreaks or high numbers of cases,” and hinted at potential “summer waves or autumn waves” of COVID.