Germany’s COVID death toll surpasses 50K
Germany’s coronavirus death toll has surpassed 50,000 as new case numbers are finally beginning to decrease.
The Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s disease control center, said Friday that an additional 859 fatalities had been reported in the previous 24 hours, bringing the country’s death toll to 50,642, The Associated Press reported.
Though the European nation, home to 83 million, was largely successful with a comparatively lower fatality rate early in the pandemic last year, the same could not be said for the fall and winter, which saw hundreds and sometimes more than 1,000 deaths reported daily.
The country surpassed 40,000 deaths just 12 days earlier on Jan. 10.
Chancellor Angela Merkel referred to the recent death toll as “terrible.”
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, “The dead in the corona pandemic are not just statistics for us. Even if we don’t know their names and families, we know that every figure stands for a loved one whom we miss infinitely.”
Beginning Friday, he intends to commemorate the dead and those fighting to survive COVID-19 each evening with a light he’ll leave shining in the window of Berlin’s Bellevue palace, according to his office.
“The increase is simply linked to the fact that the case numbers went up so much,” Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute, said of the figures.
Though France, Italy, and Spain all have smaller populations than Germany, they each have more fatalities linked to the disease.
Germany has had a little more than 2.1 million cases of the virus so far, with 17,862 new infections reported. A week earlier, there were 22,368 new cases reported.
With News Wire Services
