Berlin’s Senator for Health, Ulrike Gote, has defended the lack of contact tracing after corona infections in daycare centers and schools, which has been criticized by some parents.
In view of the large number of infections, the definition of who is the contact person of an infected child is no longer as important as it used to be, said the Green politician on Wednesday in the Health Committee of the House of Representatives. Therefore, the health authorities would have taken exactly the right path by saying: “We are prioritizing what is really important now.”
“And what is really important now is the protection of vulnerable groups,” said Gote. “And in the medical field, that means the groups that are actually affected by serious illness and even death. And it’s not primarily the children.”
These did not belong to vulnerable groups in an epidemic sense. “Of course, there are also illnesses in children that are more severe, but that’s a very, very, very small number.”
Members of vulnerable groups are people who have a higher risk of a severe course of the disease after a corona infection. These include older people, people with certain previous illnesses or people with disabilities.
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In view of the mass of infections in the omicron wave, Berlin’s medical officers recently decided that children who had contact with infected people in daycare centers and schools should no longer be identified and no longer have to be quarantined. The step itself, as well as the way the announcement was made, which some found confusing, drew criticism from a wide range of quarters. “The communication could of course have been better,” Gote admitted.