Germany has been the latest nation to reach 100,000 COVID-19 fatalities since the epidemic began, according to official numbers revealed on Thursday.
Over the last 24 hours, Germany’s disease control office has documented 351 more fatalities linked to the coronavirus, bringing the total to 100,119.
After Russia, the United Kingdom, Italy, and France, Germany is the fifth country in Europe to reach that milestone.
Germany also established a record for daily confirmed cases – 75,961 in a 24-hour period, according to the Robert Koch Institute, a government organization that collects statistics from 400 regional health offices. More than 5.57 million confirmed COVID-19 infections have been reported in Germany since the epidemic began.
The rising number of cases led Germany’s incoming administration to announce the formation of a new permanent expert panel to assist officials on how to combat the epidemic on Wednesday.
While the number of daily infections is larger than it was during the previous winter surge, the number of daily fatalities per confirmed case is presently lower. This, according to experts, is due to immunizations, which they claim minimize the risk of major sickness.
Despite this, hospitals have warned that intensive care beds are running short, with around 4,000 COVID-19 patients currently occupying them. Patients are being transferred from several hospitals in the country’s south and east.
Roland Engehausen, the general manager of the Bavarian Hospitals Association, stated that the quantity of new patients must be drastically reduced.
“As a result, we’ll have a severe scenario between Christmas and New Year’s that we haven’t seen before,” he told German news agency dpa.
On Thursday, Saxony, in the northeast, became the first German state to register a weekly confirmed case rate of more over 1,000 per 100,000 people. It has the lowest immunization rate among Germany’s 16 states, at 57.9%.
People who haven’t been immunized in more than six months should have booster shots, and those who haven’t been inoculated at all should get their first dose, according to the government. Officials estimate that just 68.1 percent of Germany’s 83 million residents are completely vaccinated, considerably below the government’s target of 75 percent.