Since mid-April, 55 cases of the Delta virus variant in the corona pandemic have been detected in the city of Frankfurt.

32 sufferers have now recovered, the city's health department announced on Saturday.

"As expected, the so-called Delta variant of Sars-CoV-2 is also spreading in Frankfurt am Main," it said in a message.

The variant is documented for the first time since the 16th calendar week, which began on April 19th.

Since more samples were specifically examined for the Delta variant across Germany and also in Frankfurt in recent weeks, part of the increase can be attributed to the increased examinations, the city announced. According to an analysis by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for the first week of June, the proportion of the delta variant in Germany had almost doubled to six percent within just one week. In the previous weeks, this mutant stagnated nationwide by around two percent.

"In view of the increased transferability of the Delta variant, the mask requirement in schools should only be relaxed with caution and not generally," said the head of the Frankfurt health department, Peter Tinnemann.

Existing cases showed that masks that were consistently worn in class had a clear protective effect.

The corona incidence has meanwhile dropped to 10.7 in Hesse.

That comes from the numbers of the RKI from Saturday (as of 3.12 a.m.).

The previous day the value was 11.4.

176 new infections were registered by Saturday morning.

Two other people died with or from the virus.

This increased the number of deaths in the state to 7,464.

The district of Groß-Gerau continued to have the highest incidence value in the state on Saturday.

Here the value was 30.5 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants within the past seven days.

The incidence remained lowest in the Vogelsberg district with a value of 1.9.

According to the data from the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi), 112 people were treated for Covid-19 in the Hessian intensive care units.

66 of them were ventilated (as of 8.19 a.m.).