The time is not favorable for the new corona test regulation that Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) presented in Berlin on Friday.

A follow-up regulation was needed because the previous regulations expire on Thursday, then there would have been no more state-funded test stations.

Now the system can continue to exist, but on the one hand the stations are to be checked more strictly, on the other hand the tests will only be free of charge for certain groups and on certain occasions.

Otherwise, citizen participation in the citizen tests is three euros.

Christian Geinitz

Business correspondent in Berlin

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Exceptions include children under the age of five, women in the first three months of pregnancy, people who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons, disabled people in institutions, household members of infected people and visitors to clinics and nursing homes.

The beneficiaries must present evidence, such as ID cards, certificates, certificates or forms for home visits.

Lauterbach had agreed on the new procedure with Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP).

Lauterbach would have liked to continue to have a free test for everyone, but that was not financially possible.

"The use of taxpayers' money will become more effective," promised Lindner.

"The federal government cannot pay for everything in the long run because our options have reached their limits." The federal government lowers the reimbursement price to the test centers from 11.50 to 9.50 euros per smear.

As a rule, the state will in future pay 6.50 euros and the citizen three euros.

Infections continue to increase significantly

The co-payment is difficult to arrange in a phase in which the infections are increasing sharply again.

Even before the feared autumn wave, the number of cases is increasing, with the health authorities reporting more than 100,000 positive laboratory tests every day.

The Robert Koch Institute gave the 7-day incidence per 100,000 inhabitants as 618 on Friday after 533 on Thursday.

There were 90 new corona deaths, 1200 more people with Covid-19 came to hospitals.

810 of these patients were in the intensive care units on Friday, 30 more than the day before.

The RKI weekly report reports an increase in the incidence of 23 percent compared to the previous week in all age groups.

The rise in the seventy to seventy-nine year olds was particularly strong at almost a third.

The outbreaks in old people's and nursing homes as well as in medical facilities continued to increase.

Almost all infections now occur with the omicron mutant, with subline BA.5 being the dominant variant in half of all cases.

The BA.5 subtype has mutated in such a way that it is not correctly recognized by the immune cells and thus also infects those who have recovered.

The RKI assesses the health risk to the population as high, but points to increasing basic immunity and less severe disease progression with omicron.

The vaccination rate is hardly increasing.

Lauterbach and the virologist Christian Drosten consider it necessary to vaccinate 40 million people before winter.

Currently the number of injections is only about 13,000 a day or 400,000 a month.

Drosten feared very high case numbers as early as September and also more hospital admissions and corona deaths.

"Doctors' practices are increasingly dealing with the summer wave"

The reporting data from the RKI does not adequately reflect the height of the corona wave.

They are based on PCR tests, which are no longer mandatory for infections and which many infected people do not undergo.

"It can be assumed that there will be a large number of unrecorded cases," says Dominik von Stillfried, chairman of the Central Institute for Statutory Health Insurance Physician Care (ZI).

The extent of this “detection gap” and how quickly the summer wave is increasing can be indirectly deduced.

For this purpose, the ZI evaluated the initial assessments of the medical on-call service on 116 117.

When describing the symptoms, it turned out that the number of respiratory diseases is rising steeply - an indication of increased Covid cases.

In June a year ago, about the same number of patients with respiratory problems (ARE) contacted the emergency number as in previous years.

At that time there was no corona summer wave.

Currently, however, there are almost 50 percent more cases than usual at this time.

A month ago there was also a deviation from the average, but it was not even 15 percent.

Since then, the curve has shot up.

"You can see very clearly from this that medical practices and medical on-call services are now increasingly dealing with the Corona summer wave," says Stillfried.

Almost 2.8 million calls have been evaluated since January, more than a third of which concerned ARE.