What pandemic? Survey finds most Germans feel their lives have not changed much

Germany could begin lifting coronavirus restrictions after winter as Sweden considers digital vaccine passport

A medical worker helps a woman take a PCR test at a Covid-19 testing station set up in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, Germany. Getty Images

People walk along an almost empty street in Berlin, Germany. The lockdown state governments launched in December has been continued into February. Getty Images

Protesters chant slogans, on top of a van during a demonstration in Lille, northern France. French unions called for strikes and protests around the country to demand more government aid for those struggling financially because of the pandemic. AP Photo

Protesters march during a demonstration in Marseille, southern France. AP Photo

People protest in Paris to highlight the current economic and cultural difficulties being experienced across France. AFP

An election worker prepares ballot boxes and PPE to be delivered at polling stations in Barcelona, Spain. Spain's Catalonia regional elections will be held on February 14. AP Photo

A mortuary worker disinfests a coffin carrying the body of a person who died of Covid-19 in Girona, Spain. Spain's health ministry said Wednesday that the nation has surpassed 60,000 fatalities. AP Photo

A woman takes images of empty and moored canal cruise boats docked in Amsterdam, Netherlands. AP Photo

A slim majority of Germans say their lives have not changed drastically despite the effects of coronavirus lockdowns, according to researchers.

A poll of 4,069 people in the US, Germany, France and the UK found that 52 per cent of German respondents said that the pandemic had changed their lives “not too much” or “not much at all”.

In neighbouring France, 67 per cent of people said that the pandemic had changed “a great deal or fair amount” of their everyday lives.

In the UK, 70 per cent of respondents felt the same way.

The ratio was highest in the US, where more than 450,000 people have died of coronavirus, the world’s highest Covid-19 death toll. Seventy-four per cent of American respondents said their lives had changed a great deal during the pandemic.

Across the board, people felt their lives had changed, especially as the pandemic entered the winter months, reflecting record daily death tolls and renewed lockdowns in much of Europe and the UK.

The poll by the US-based Pew Research Centre came as a German politician suggested that its current lockdown could soon end.

Health Minister Jens Spahn acknowledged that public anger at the country’s two-month hard lockdown was rising.

"We can't stay in this hard lockdown all winter. We would not tolerate that well as a society," he told the Funke media group.

Scientists, however, said that social restrictions could not ease while the infection rate in the country was still high.

The Federal Association of German Public Health Officers last week called for a Covid-19 elimination strategy.

However, Mr Spahn said that the goal for Germany remained "to prevent the health system from being overburdened – and not to avoid every infection".

"To get it down to zero infections and keep it that way comes at a disproportionate cost in other areas of life," he said.

Meanwhile, authorities in Sweden plan to launch a digital coronavirus "vaccine passport" by summer, which would allow vaccinated people to travel and participate in other activities, ministers said.

Sweden is the second European country to outline immunity passport plans after Denmark announced similar plans on Wednesday.

In the UK, ministers were under pressure to pinpoint a start date for its hotel quarantine system.

The hotels are designed to keep out mutant variants of coronavirus but the chief executive of the UK’s largest airport hotel chain said the industry had been “kept in the dark” over the government’s plan since it was announced nearly two weeks ago.

“In any normal company, if you went out and announced a programme nationally, you hadn't thought about how you were going to plan it, and you hadn’t spoken to the people involved, I’m not sure I’d have a job,” Best Western Hotels chief executive Rob Paterson said.

UK Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi said he was unconcerned that the hotels were not yet up and running, because the scheme is not a “silver bullet” in stopping imported coronavirus cases.

Earlier, he said there were about 4,000 variants of coronavirus in the world that British scientists were monitoring.

Meanwhile, the editor of the respected British Medical Journal said that world leaders should be held accountable for the "social murder" inflicted on populations by their mishandling of the pandemic.

"Politicians must be held to account by legal and electoral means, indeed by any national and international constitutional means necessary," BMJ editor Kamran Abbasi said.

"State failures that led us to two million deaths are actions and inactions that should shame us all."