Relying on Science and Politics, Merkel Offers a Cautious Virus Re-entry Plan

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Relying on Science and Politics, Merkel Offers a Cautious Virus Re-entry Plan

Shorn of any bravado, her announcement seemed again to make Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, a de facto leader on the Continent and something of an example for Western nations

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/world/europe/coronavirus-germany-merkel.html




Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany at a news conference at the chancellery in Berlin on Wednesday about the plans of the German government to slowly ease lockdown restrictions imposed during the coronavirus outbreak.Credit...Pool photo by Christian Marquardt


April 15, 2020

BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday set in motion a plan for Germany to begin lifting social and economic restrictions in place because of the coronavirus, even as she warned that the road ahead would look less like a return to normal than a way to live with a pandemic that has overturned ordinary life.

The chancellor, a physicist by training, was typically restrained and focused on the science as she announced the government’s cautious step-by-step plan, for which she had won the agreement of regional leaders in Germany’s diffuse federal system.

Shorn of any bravado, her announcement seemed again to make Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, a de facto leader on the Continent and something of an example for Western nations looking to navigate the tricky course of rebooting economic activity and fighting the virus.

Her approach stood in stark contrast to the fraught political divisions in the United States, where state authorities have often been at odds with President Trump, who has made forceful but erratic predictions about the virus.


“We have achieved something,” Ms. Merkel said at a news conference, “something that by no means was a given at the start — namely that our doctors and carers, all those in the medical field, in the hospitals, were not overwhelmed.”..................................