German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has gone into home quarantine after a doctor who gave her a vaccination on Friday tested positive for coronavirus.
Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, announced in a statement on Sunday.
Seibert also stated that the chancellor will continuously be tested for coronavirus because a test at this early stage would not be reliable, adding that she would continue her full workload from her quarantine.
Earlier on Sunday, Germany implemented a “contact ban” rather than a full nationwide lockdown in an effort to curb the spread of coronavirus.
Merkel said in a press conference that the country would toughen measures and “reduce contact with people as much as possible.”
Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, has tested positive for coronavirus, according to a tweet sent from his official account.
“He is feeling fine and is in quarantine. He is asymptomatic and was tested out of an abundance of caution due to his extensive travel and events. He was not aware of any direct contact with an infected person,” the tweet said.
About 50 per cent of more than 500 tests for the novel coronavirus came out positive in the United States on Saturday.
“That’s very high,” Chief Operating Officer, Presbyterian Hospital, New York, Dr Laura Forese, said in a briefing.
Forese said the hospitals had 558 Covid-19 inpatients, and about one in five are receiving Intensive Care Unit care.
That number “is a snapshot. It’s changing probably as I’m speaking to you today,” she said. “We have many more who have been sent home, either Covid-positive tested, or presumed to have that.”
Of nearly 30,000 cases in the United States, more than 15,000 are in New York State, including more than 9,000 in New York City.
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