Berlin, Mar 27 (IANS): A Covid-19 test will become mandatory for all Germany-bound air travellers starting from March 29, Minister of Health Jens Spahn announced at a press conference.
The mandatory testing requirement was originally planned to take effect on Sunday, but it has been postponed to give travellers and airline companies more time to prepare, Xinhua news agency quoted Spahn as saying.
For any air traveller to enter Germany, a negative Covid-19 test had to be presented before departure.
"This is a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of the virus through travel on vacation and, incidentally, it also serves to protect passengers on the plane," said Spahn.
Currently, only travellers coming from countries with particularly high infection rates must get tested before boarding, German news agency dpa reported.
Flight crews will not be affected by the new requirement, the Health Ministry said.
Travellers will have to bear the costs of the tests themselves.
Spahn said Covid-19 numbers in Germany were rising too fast and virus variants, such as the more contagious B.1.1.7, made "the situation particularly dangerous".
Daily Covid-19 cases continued to rise as Germany on Friday registered 21,573 new cases in 24 hours, almost 4,100 more than one week ago, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI).
If the country's infection situation would "continue unchecked, we run the risk that our healthcare system will reach its limits in the course of April", warned Spahn, also referring to rising numbers of intensive care patients in Germany.
The incidence rate of confirmed cases in Germany in the past seven days rose to 119.1 per 100,000 inhabitants on Friday, according to RKI, the government agency for disease control and prevention.
"There are very clear signals that this wave can be even worse than the first two waves," said RKI President Lothar Wieler at the press conference, warning that the COVID-19 situation would even worsen in the coming weeks as the 7-day-incidence stood at just 70 two weeks ago.
"We are only at the beginning of this development. And if we do not take massive countermeasures now, the consequences will be serious," Wieler warned.
Germany has so far registered a total of 2,754,019 coronavirus cases and 75,735 deaths.