The virologist Christian Drosten sees Germany in an "emergency situation" with Corona and considers new contact restrictions to be conceivable.

"We have to do something now," said the head of virology at the Charité in Berlin on Tuesday in the NDR podcast "The Coronavirus Update" on the current corona situation in Germany.

In the medium and long term, the way out of the pandemic is clear: “We have to close the vaccination gaps.” The “ideal goal” must be “a population that has been completely vaccinated three times over”.

In view of the full intensive care units, however, one cannot wait for that.

In the short term, measures must be discussed again, "which we actually hoped to have behind us," said Drosten.

"So now we must probably control the infection activity again through contact measures - not likely, but definitely," said the virologist.

He expects a very stressful winter "with new, let's say calmly: shutdown measures".

Measures such as 3G or even 2G are probably not enough to reduce the number of infections enough in view of the delta variant.