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The debate about ways out of the lockdown is getting more intense.

The German Association of Towns and Municipalities calls for clear perspectives for easing the corona restrictions.

A “graduated exit strategy from the lockdown” is necessary, said General Manager Gerd Landsberg of the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung” (Tuesday).

The infection numbers are still too high, but they are falling.

Therefore, politicians are called upon to make it clear from which values ​​which easing should apply.

That will vary from region to region.

However, the prospects for daycare centers and primary schools should always be in the foreground.

Chancellor Angela Merkel recently announced that after the lockdown, schools and daycare centers would have to be reopened first.

At the same time, despite the falling corona numbers, she urged the longer lockdown, which has been limited to mid-February.

One should not wait until new, particularly contagious variants of the corona virus spread.

"Then it would be too late to prevent a third wave of the pandemic and possibly an even more violent one than ever before," she warned.

In an internal video link of the Union parliamentary group leaders from the federal and state levels, Merkel is also said to have expressed pessimism about the current situation, reports the "Bild".

"We live on a powder keg due to the mutations," the Chancellor is said to have said.

And: "The thing slipped away from us."

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The chairwoman of the Federal Association of German Medical Officials, Ute Teichert, also urged caution.

"We cannot relax again with an incidence of 100, 70 or 50," she told the newspapers of the Funke media group.

In the long term, you have to come under an incidence of 50 - that is, under a value of 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants within a week.

According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the seven-day incidence in Germany was 111.2 on Monday morning.

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

In the end, the incidence should be below 10, demanded Teichert.

"As a goal, I consider a zero-covid strategy, that is, an orientation towards an incidence in the single-digit range, to be the right one." With a view to highly infectious virus variants, it is important to keep contacts low.

The variants initially detected in Great Britain (B.1.1.7) and South Africa (B.1.351) are considered highly contagious.

“We have a dark cloud of very serious danger in the background,” said government spokesman Steffen Seibert on Monday in Berlin.

The mass vaccinations are thus increasingly becoming a race against time.

The head of the Standing Vaccination Commission (Stiko), Thomas Mertens, regretted the delivery cuts made by the manufacturers Biontech and Astrazeneca for the EU: “That is bad because we will reach our vaccination targets later.

It's probably less about cuts, but more about production losses, ”said Mertens of the Düsseldorf“ Rheinische Post ”(Tuesday).

But he warned against changing the vaccination strategy: "On the contrary, we have to vaccinate people at risk of serious illness, hospitalization and death as quickly as possible."