Closing children’s daycare centres for Covid was unnecessary says German Health Minister

ACCORDING to Germany’s Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, closing the country’s daycare centres for Covid was unnecessary.

Speaking about a recent Covid study in Germany’s Berlin on Wednesday, November 2, Lauterbach, who recently had an investigation against him dropped, said: “Closing daycare centres was definitely not medically appropriate and would not have been necessary to the extent we did at the time, according to today’s knowledge.”

He added: “There will be no more closures of this kind.”

The 59-year-old made his comments ahead of the final report of the “Corona Daycare Study” published together with Germany’s Family Minister Lisa Paus.

Paus admitted that the restriction had caused a lot of damage to children, especially to those from “socially disadvantaged families”.

She said that the study showed that the children who could have benefited most from early childhood education and support are now suffering badly from the consequences of this Covid restriction.

She also added that children from socially disadvantaged families who attended daycare centres shut due to strict lockdown measures in Germany “now have almost twice as much need for support, for example in language or motor skills, as before the pandemic.”

According to the study, the number of infections in daycare centres followed those in society as a whole rather than vice versa. The incidence remained consistently below that of older children and adolescents. Children of day-care centre age infected with Corona also usually showed few or no symptoms, at least in the case of the first Covid variants, as reported by Welt.

On Friday, September 15, Germany announced they were reintroducing some mandatory Covid rules once again as they look to ‘stop the spread’ in autumn and winter.

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