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How does the hard lockdown work - and do the anti-corona measures need to be tightened?

This is a question that drives politics.

In the past few weeks she could only rely on an uncertain number of figures.

The holidays made it particularly difficult to draw reliable conclusions from the data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI): In the period around Christmas and New Year, fewer people went to the doctor to get tested;

many laboratories and health authorities also switched to holiday mode.

They said more will be known on January 17th.

That has now passed - and Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) speaks of "initial successes" in reducing the number of infections.

The RKI's overview map becomes more colorful, the red color gives way because the seven-day incidence is falling.

The reproductive value, which shows how many people a person with Covid infects on average, has been well below 1 on average since the lockdown began.

At the same time, the number of tests performed increases again, but the positive rate remains very high.

There is good news from the intensive care units, where the occupancy rate with seriously ill Covid-19 patients has been falling for two weeks - bad news, however, with the death rate.

The individual points in the overview:

New infections and incidence

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The RKI reported 124,991 new infections last week - if you ignore the deceptive decline over Christmas, that is the lowest number since the end of November.

At the peak of the second wave of infections so far, 173,293 new infections were reported per week in mid-December.

So there are currently a good 48,000 fewer people who tested positive, which corresponds to a decrease of almost 28 percent.

The number of new infections reported within seven days per 100,000 inhabitants - the so-called incidence - fell to currently 134.4.

Its previous high was reached on December 22nd at 197.6.

If you factor out the problematic Christmas season, the last incidence was lower on December 3, at 134.

That may be reason for hope - but as recently as the summer, the nationwide incidence was in the low single-digit range.

The target value of 50 new infections per week is still a long way off.

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The infection rate continues to be distributed unevenly across Germany.

Three federal states report incidences below 100: Bremen (78.7), Schleswig-Holstein (90.5) and Lower Saxony (93).

Four states, however, exceed the 200: Brandenburg (220.2), Saxony-Anhalt (243.1), Saxony (274) and Thuringia (287.6).

At least in Saxony, which had reported an incidence of 441.3 on Christmas Day, the trend reversal seems to have been achieved.

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Tests and positive rate

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The positive rate indicates which proportion of the PCR tests carried out were positive.

A high rate is taken as an indication of a high number of unreported cases.

A normalization seems to be emerging here - even if the numbers are still high.

In the summer the positive rate was in the low single-digit range, in December it had risen to over eleven percent, and over Christmas even to 12.89 percent.

It got even worse the following week around New Year's Eve: Here 15.88 percent of the PCR tests were positive, while the number of tests analyzed fell to a good 800,000.

In the first week of January, the number of tests evaluated rose again to 1.2 million - and the rate fell to 12.8 percent.

Further figures are still pending, the RKI publishes them on Wednesdays in its situation report.

Further normalization remains to be seen.

R value

The number of reproductions is an important factor in observing the development of the infection process.

Only when the value is below 1.0 for a long time does the infection process subside.

The so-called seven-day R-value calculated by the RKI was well above 1 in the first weeks of December.

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The good news: the average since the start of the hard lockdown has been 0.92, including in the first two weeks of January.

Strong fluctuations that caused excitement, for example when the 4-day R climbed to 1.25 on January 6, can be explained by late reports from the holidays.

On average, 100 infected people recently infected 92 more people.

For comparison: at the beginning of the R-value calculations at the beginning of March, at a time when the spread was more or less uncontrolled, the R-value fluctuated between 2.5 and 3.2.

During the toughest phase of the first lockdown, from March 23 to April 20, the R-value averaged 0.86.

Intensive care patients

A ray of hope: Since the intensive care bed occupancy with Covid-19 patients reached its highest level on January 3rd, the occupancy rate has been falling.

With a total of 5762 occupied beds, many hospitals were working at their limit at this point.

In the case of those particularly severely affected, who had to be invasively ventilated, the apex was reached a day later on January 4, when 3,211 Covid patients were invasively ventilated.

Since then, the numbers have been falling, on Sunday there were for the first time in weeks under 5000 intensive care patients: The Divi intensive care registry showed in its daily report 4,971 occupied intensive care beds, of which 2835 patients had to be invasively ventilated.

That is a decrease of almost 800 patients (minus 13.7 percent) and almost 380 invasive ventilators (minus 11.7 percent).

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During the same period, the proportion of those who received invasive ventilation rose from 55 to 57 percent.

One of the reasons for this is that the most severe cases can have a long disease course and are often connected to a ventilator for weeks.

So the numbers are falling more slowly here.

Death toll

The entire first wave from March to May claimed 8,739 deaths in three months.

Since the beginning of the second wave in October, 37,145 people have died of or with the coronavirus, in January alone the figure was 13,009.

The proportion of the deceased among the total infected climbed to over two percent.

There is no sign of a trend reversal.

Falling numbers of new infections are first noticeable in hospital admissions, then in intensive workload and only after a significant delay in deaths.

outlook

In January, the corona rules were tightened again.

Since these new requirements have only been in place for around a week, they cannot yet have a major impact on the reported figures.

The new virus mutations from Great Britain, South Africa and Brazil, the spread of which RKI boss Lother Wieler warned last week, are of concern.

The RKI therefore remains cautious in its situation report from Sunday evening: “After a sharp increase in the number of cases at the beginning of December, a decline during the holidays and a renewed increase in the first week of January, the number of cases seems to be stabilizing again.

The R-value is currently around 1. Due to the very high number of infected people in Germany, this means a high number of new infections every day, ”it says there.