Revolt at Merkel’s ‘one friend only’ advice to children

Regional leaders reject German chancellor’s curbs restricting pupil meet-ups outside school hours

OPPOSITION is growing in Germany to Angela Merkel’s attempts to impose tighter coronavirus prevention restrictions on children.

Regional governments are refusing to implement official advice that children should only meet with one playmate outside school hours to slow the spread of the virus.

They are drawing up their own proposals for schools after unanimously rejecting Mrs Merkel’s plans to reduce teaching hours and make masks compulsory for children of all ages.

The row highlights a divide between regional governments and Mrs Merkel on how to respond to the second wave in Germany.

Mrs Merkel wants much tougher restrictions, but under the federal system, the 16 states have the final say and they tore up her proposals on Monday.

It has now emerged that several regions agreed in private talks to go a step further and reject the advice that children should only meet with one playmate outside school hours.

The advice has been labelled as harmful to children’s well-being.

“It’s a policy that has nothing to do with real life,” Rainer Haseloff, the prime minister of Saxony-anhalt and a member of Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrat party (CDU), said.

“I find it too restrictive to allow children to meet only one friend,” Hubert

Aiwanger, the regional deputy prime minister of Bavaria, said.

“Children would be forced to choose between friends. There will be tearful rejections. That is ruthless,” Heinz Hilgers, president of the German Child Protection Association, said.

“It can’t be that children aren’t allowed to meet their friends, but buses and trains are full.”

Thomas Fischbach, president of the German Association of Paediatricians, added: “Since it has been shown that children up to 10 pass the virus on much less often, even if they are infected, the planned limitation to one playmate for this age group is superfluous and harmful,”

Mrs Merkel initially wanted a binding rule under which children would have to nominate one playmate for the duration of lockdown. When regional leaders refused, she i nsisted on still including it as a recommendation.

The row looks set to come to a head at new talks next week at which regional leaders will present Mrs Merkel with their proposals for schools after they rejected her plans to return to more remote teaching.

Calls for schools to remain open were given a boost yesterday by a new study in Hamburg that found children were more likely to become infected at private gatherings than at school.

The study found 78 per cent of children infected between the summer and autumn holidays caught it outside school, with those under 12 only half as likely to become infected.

Many schools only registered a single infection in a year group within 10 days, suggesting it was unlikely the virus was spread at school. Out of 472 schools, 171 recorded infections, but only 23 of those had multiple infections.