Merkel Pledges to Strengthen Germany’s Public Health Service

(Bloomberg) --

Germany will prioritize strengthening its public-health service and hire more workers, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her weekly podcast aired on Saturday.

Under the plan, the federal government will spend 4 billion euros ($4.7 billion) by 2026 to allow for an additional 5,000 public health-care workers and the improvement of the digitalization of health departments. The so-called ‘pact for the public health service’ was announced in a separate briefing by Health Minister Jens Spahn and Dilek Kalayci, the chairwoman of regional health ministers. The funding should also help make the service more attractive, they said.

“Looking back, one can critically say that both in the federal states and in the municipalities, when it came to providing adequate equipment, the health-care departments weren’t very high on the list of priorities,” Kalayci told reporters.

Merkel is set to meet health workers, mayors and district administrators on Tuesday to discuss the service in a video conference.

Germany recorded almost 7,000 cases at the peak of the outbreak in late March. Extensive contact tracing and an expansion of testing capacities has since allowed authorities to keep the infection rate under the key threshold of 1.0.

‘Worst Behind Us’

The country had 1,443 new cases in the 24 hours through Saturday morning, bringing the total to 250,283, Johns Hopkins University data shows. That compares with 1,429 the previous day and a four-month high of around 1,700 just two weeks ago. The reproduction factor of the virus, known as R-naught, rose to 0.85 on Friday from 0.77 the day before, according to the latest estimate from the Robert Koch Institute.

The measures the government took in March to stabilize the economy and stimulate it over the summer are working better than expected, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz told Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung on Saturday. The economy may be able to return to pre-epidemic levels by the end of next year or early 2022, Scholz said. “There is a lot of evidence that we have the worst behind us and that the economy is gradually improving,” he was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

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