Germany may extend its lockdown into March to tackle the spread of a more contagious variant of the virus.
Any easing of restrictions at some schools or daycare centres will depend on local infection rates, German media reported on Saturday.
The highly infectious mutation first found in England has spread to 13 of the 16 federal states and is expected to become the dominant strain.
Germany’s infection rate per 100,000 people has fallen to 79.9, but health officials want a rate below 50 before lockdown restrictions can be lifted.
The bottleneck lies elsewhere
“The situation is far from under control,” said Prof Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute.
Health Minister Jens Spahn said: “The virus is not tired yet. On the contrary, it has just received another boost.”
German and French leaders on Friday defended the EU against accusations it has mishandled delivering vaccines to member states.
Chancellor Angela Merkel conceded that “production capacities are not as large as we had imagined”.
On Saturday, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said more Covid vaccines should have been ordered in 2020.
“I’m angry about some of the decisions that were taken last year,” Mr Scholz said. “I think there had been the opportunity to order more of the vaccines.”
EU countries have so far given first doses to about 4 per cent of their populations, compared with 11 per cent for the US and almost 17 per cent for Britain.
In an opinion piece to run in Sunday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it was misleading to suggest that sealing vaccine contracts earlier would have hastened delivery.
“The bottleneck lies elsewhere. Producing a new vaccine is an incredibly complex business,” she wrote. “Among the hundreds of components needed, important ingredients are in short supply worldwide”.
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Fly from Dubai or Abu Dhabi to Chiang Mai in Thailand, via Bangkok, before taking a five-hour bus ride across the Laos border to Huay Xai. The land border crossing at Huay Xai is a well-trodden route, meaning entry is swift, though travellers should be aware of visa requirements for both countries.
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More on Quran memorisation:
Sri Lanka-India Test series schedule
- 1st Test India won by 304 runs at Galle
- 2nd Test Thursday-Monday at Colombo
- 3rd Test August 12-16 at Pallekele
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
