Marco Buschmann has called on the German government to remove all remaining coronavirus restrictions, after the country’s top virologist declared the pandemic over.

German Justice Minister calls remove all coronavirus restrictions

Marco Buschmann, an FDP member and Justice Minister in Germany’s coalition government, has called on Olaf Scholz to finally remove all remaining coronavirus restrictions. The plea comes after Christian Drosten, one of Germany’s top emerging virus virologists, declared the coronavirus pandemic to be over.

Speaking to Tagesspiegel, Drosten, who is a member of the country’s coronavirus expert panel, said that the pandemic has now moved into an endemic stage. The head of virology at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin saw this winter as a turning point in the journey of the pandemic. “We are experiencing the first endemic wave with Sars-CoV-2 this winter; in my estimation, the pandemic is over,” Drosten said.

As the pandemic unfolded throughout 2020 and 2021, Drosten was known in Germany for his cautious approach to lifting restrictions. As a consequence, Buschmann said he believed Drosten’s declaration to be all the more reliable when it came to lifting all Germany’s preventative measures for the first time since March 2020. 

Apart from in Bavaria and Saxony-Anhalt, where public transport mask restrictions were scrapped at the beginning of December, people in Germany are still required to wear masks on public transport in every other state, on long-distance trains and in hospitals across Germany.

The last coronavirus winter in Germany?

Both Drosten and fellow coronavirus expert panel member Christian Karagiannidis, said they believed that what remains of the winter months could mark the last significant coronavirus winter in Germany.

In comparison to its European neighbours, Germany’s vaccine rollout was not as successful, though the country is still vaccinating a resident roughly every five seconds and 76 percent of the population have now received at least one dose. Speaking again to Tagesspiegel, Drosten said that herd immunity would be resilient enough to say that the virus "didn’t face much of a chance" in the summer months.