Germany exceeds 2 million infections and registers more than a thousand deaths

Berlin, Jan 15 – Germany registered 22,368 new infections with coronavirus in the last 24 hours and thus exceeds two million infections since the start of the pandemic, while the death toll, with 1,113 in one day, returned to exceed a thousand, after the maximum reached on Thursday, with 1,244 fatalities.
The number of positives since the first contagion was announced in the country now totals 2,000,958 and that of deaths, 44,994, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) of virology, updated last midnight.
The maximum number of infections was registered on December 18 with 33,777 new infections.
Around 1,641,200 people have been cured and the number of active cases stands at about 314,900, according to RKI estimates.
In Germany as a whole, the cumulative incidence in the last seven days stands at 146.1 cases per 100,000 inhabitants and new infections totaled 121,524 in the last week.
The peak incidence was registered on December 22 with 197.6 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants in a week.
The number of patients with covid-19 in intensive care units on Thursday amounted to 5,125 -60 less in one day-, of which 2,943 -57% and 27 less compared to Wednesday-, need assisted respiration, according to data from the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI).
In one day, 544 new admissions of patients with covid-19 to the ICU were registered and 604 left intensive care, of which 31% correspond to deaths, the RKI states in its daily report.
The reproduction factor (R) that takes into account infections in a seven-day interval is 1.02 in Germany as a whole, which implies that every 100 infected infects an average of 102 other people.
Since December 26, the number of people who have already received the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine in Germany has risen to 842,455, which corresponds to 10.1 individuals per 1,000 inhabitants.
German media reported yesterday that German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to advance to next week her meeting with regional powers, initially scheduled for January 25, in response to the alarm over a possible spread of new variants of covid-19 and the high numbers of infections and deaths.
In a virtual meeting last night with the leadership of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the chancellor also advocated tightening restrictions, which could include curfews, the mandatory use of FFP-2 masks, border controls and restrictions on public transport, points out the n-tv network.
Already in the morning, the president of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) of virology, Lothar Wieler, had expressed his concern about the possible impact of the most infectious mutations of the coronavirus and had been in favor of a tightening of the restrictions, including the mobility.