Good evening,


as a child, the turn of the year always plunged me into a moderately severe crisis of meaning.

Mother, father, grandparents - they all said goodbye in the evening with the words “See you next year”.

If even one minute in a children's world can feel infinitely long, how should the time be bridged “until the next year”?

At the time, I didn't understand that one year is sometimes only separated by a few seconds.

Marie Lisa Kehler

Deputy head of the regional section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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Why the short excursion into childhood as a writer?

Well, the words are supposed to calm you down.

The next Hauptwache will actually not come back until next year, but it will come sooner than expected.

Short break, on Sunday it goes on.

Until then, you can reminisce a little. For example, at the turn of the year 2001 to 2002, when the euro replaced the D-Mark. The amazement at the coins that felt so strange in the hand, the touching of the bills, which all still looked as if they had just been freshly printed. They were too. Manfred Köhler recalls the changeover, conversion attempts and his last D-Mark purchase. There was a sesame bun. The euro anniversary will be celebrated in a big way in 2022. Among other things, with a light show that is projected onto the facade of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Because rockets are not fired in many places, it may be worth taking a look at the ECB on New Year's Eve. The light show starts at midnight.And also in the following days she will be seen again and again in the evening hours.

Take a deep breath, let the year end relaxed - this is not an option for the employees at the Frankfurt Health Department. You have to go back to work on weekends as well. Turn of the year here and there. Even on public holidays, the inquiries in the health department do not stop. Almost three hundred people are on duty seven days a week. Editor Mona Ganster asked how contact tracking works in times of extremely high infection rates. The staff tries to research possible places of infection in order to get a better overview of the situation. The tracking of contacts will become less important, the higher the number of infections caused by Omikron, suggests Peter Tinnemann, head of the health department. There are currently around 500 known cases in Hesse. When the numbers increase tenfoldat some point, contact tracking no longer makes sense. In Hesse, five to ten percent of laboratory samples are tested for the Omikron variant. The proportion of the more contagious variant in the current numbers could therefore already be higher. In an interview with the FAZ, Tinnemann explains why employees in certain industries are already able to circumvent the quarantine rules in very specific cases.