ifo President Fuest: Germany Must Urgently Contain Coronavirus Wave
From an economic perspective, ifo President Clemens Fuest has called for urgent action to stem the new wave of the coronavirus in Germany. “We need more testing and more vaccinations, and we need to track infections. We should aim not for a lockdown but for 2G or 3G restrictions,” he said in Munich on Monday. “There is a particularly high risk at the moment that intensive care units will fill up primarily with unvaccinated patients and, as hospitals approach capacity, that schools will close again. This will have extremely high long-term economic and social costs.”
For Germany alone in 2020 and 2021, Fuest added, the coronavirus-related loss of economic output amounts to some EUR 325 billion – and this is only a fraction of the actual overall economic costs. Covid-19, he said, had triggered the worst economic crisis worldwide since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The Swedish experiment, which tolerated a heavier caseload as the price for avoiding lockdown measures, did not work, he said: Sweden’s economy shrank by 2.8 percent in 2020 – the same as Finland’s and significantly more than Denmark’s or Norway’s. At the same time, however, the number of fatalities was much higher, at over 850 per million population, compared with under 100 in Norway and around 100 in Finland.
