At the latest when Karl Lauterbach is on the talk show, the summer and its apparently carefree close contacts with bare faces are over.

We almost forgot that there was something else.

Autumn, whose prospects are already gloomy enough with inflation and skyrocketing energy costs, not to mention the meteorologically wet and cold end-of-day mood, is already casting its uncomfortable shadows in the third year of the pandemic.

Didn't Christian Drosten just remind us when he said he no longer believed "that by the end of the year we'd have the impression that the pandemic was over"?

Sandra Kegel

Responsible editor for the feuilleton.

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In truth, we are already experiencing a summer wave these days.

The 7-day incidence is increasing day by day, on Saturday it was 696, in the previous week 632, in the previous month 221, and the number of corona patients in the intensive care units has also reached a thousand again for the first time.

The days of the RKI press conferences will be back in our house as soon as reliably.

But at the latest when the Infection Protection Act expires on September 23, politicians must be ready with a new law so that we don’t stumble again unprepared and aimlessly in corona waves with possibly new variants that nobody knows today what they are in four or six months can do everything.

The government coalition has therefore asked a committee of experts for a report on the previous corona measures.

The fact that the FDP, in the person of Minister of Justice Buschmann, pressed for a basis for future decisions, while Karl Lauterbach explained again to Anne Will on Sunday evening that he had not discovered anything in it that he did not already know was a gift.

The report is somewhat vague as to what measures made sense, such as masks indoors, and what was rather questionable: school closures, for example.

Above all, the 100-page paper revealed the catastrophic data situation on Corona, which is due in particular to the exaggerated data protection in this country.

The appraisers had to poke around in the fog at times without reliable figures.

Even Christian Drosten had left the committee to which he had been appointed after a short time: "Knitted with a hot needle and scientifically thin" was the verdict of SZ science editor Christina Berndt on the show.

Lockdown and school closures

But what follows from all this?

Decisive vagueness, one might say.

For example, in the case of Anne Will, the SPD health minister agreed with the FDP health politician Christine Aschenberg-Dugnus, who was present, and the absent Minister of Justice Buschmann, that lockdowns in autumn could be ruled out due to the high level of immunity in the population.

He also considered school closures to be “very unlikely”.

A little later, however, Christina Berndt was right, who remarked how dangerous it was at this point in time to rule out any measures, because a large set of tools is needed right now.

The intensive care nurse Ricardo Lange criticized the fact that the desolate situation of the nursing staff in the hospitals played no role in the report and that, even after more than two years of the pandemic, the reality has still not been resolved.

He and his colleagues feel immediately that clinics are already reorganizing themselves or even being temporarily closed.

Vaccination and citizen test

So the conversation went from one topic to the next, sometimes it was about the Nursing Relief Act, sometimes the nursing staff regulation PPR 2, the missed vaccination requirement came back on the tableau and also the recently no longer free citizen tests, which cost taxpayers a billion euros a month .

But what measures can we expect in autumn?

What does the new Infection Protection Act look like?

And how are the fourth graders supposed to catch up on the learning slump caused by Corona?

It seems as if the reviewers weren't the only ones poking around in the fog: the show was over after an hour – and all questions were left unanswered.