German state finance minister kills self over COVID impact
BERLIN (Reuters) — A German finance minister killed himself after despairing over the coronavirus fallout, his colleague claimed.
The body of 54-year-old Thomas Schaefer, the state finance minister of Germany’s Hesse region, was found on the train tracks at Hochheim, near Frankfurt.
A police investigation concluded that Schaeffer killed himself.
Schaefer had served as Hesse’s state finance minister for a decade, and he was a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union.
State governor Volker Bouffier speculated that Schaefer’s death was caused by stress related to the handling of the coronavirus crisis.
“I have to assume these worries overwhelmed him,” Bouffier said.
He further explained that Schaefer was concerned about “whether it would be possible to succeed in fulfilling the population’s huge expectations, particularly of financial help.”
Germany’s upper house of Parliament approved a $814billion aid package to cushion the economic impact of the coronavirus.
In the race against the coronavirus, Germany is betting on widespread testing and quarantining to break the infection chain, a strategy borrowed from South Korea whose success in slowing the outbreak has become the envy of the world.
Germany is already carrying out more coronavirus tests than any other European country at a rate of 300,000 to 500,000 a week, according to officials.
But Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government aims to ramp that up to at least 200,000 tests a day, according to an interior ministry document seen by several German media outlets.