German health minister says unvaccinated will catch COVID-19 by end of winter

German Health Minister Jens Spahn said that those who have not been vaccinated are likely to catch COVID-19 by the end of this winter season, adding that some of those people will die, according to reports from The Associated Press.

“By the end of this winter pretty much everyone in Germany … will have been vaccinated, recovered or died,” Spahn told reporters in Berlin, according to the AP, adding, “With the highly contagious delta variant this is very, very likely and that’s why we are recommending vaccination so urgently.”

The AP reports that Germany has seen an increase of about 50 percent in new coronavirus cases in the past week and that Monday’s COVID-19 daily totals for Germany were around 30,000 as the country nears the 100,000 COVID-19 death toll milestone. 

Spahn is calling on Germans to get vaccinated and to get a booster shot if they were vaccinated six months ago or longer, as he stated that 50 million doses of the mRNA vaccines Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna will be available for the rest of the year to keep up Germany’s vaccination rate, according to the AP. 

The German population needs to hit a 75 percent vaccination rate across the nation in order to quell case rates, according to health experts, and Germany currently has a vaccination rate of 68 percent, reports the AP. 

Some German politicians have called for measures that would be similar to those in the country’s neighbor nation, Austria, which has implemented a nationwide mandate on COVID-19 vaccinations, reports the AP. 

Karl Lauterbach, a moderate left politician of the Social Democrats in Germany, said that he supports mandated vaccination and has called for rules that require people to show vaccination or recovery proof upon entry to stores and public facilities, reports the AP.