Berlin – Germany on Sunday declared France’s Covid-battered Moselle region a high-risk area for virus variants, prompting tougher entry rules for visitors at the border.
France’s eastern Moselle region is now classed as an area “at particularly high risk of infection due to widespread occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 virus variants”, announced Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for disease control.
From Tuesday, people travelling from Moselle – which lies next to Germany’s Saarland and Rhineland states – will need to be able to show a fresh negative coronavirus test.
Germany has already introduced tough checks at its land borders with the Czech Republic and Austria’s Tyrol region, ignoring calls from Brussels to keep frontiers within the European Union open.
At those crossings, only Germans and non-German residents are allowed to enter, as well as lorry drivers and cross-border commuters working in certain categories of jobs.
Every vehicle is stopped and occupants must produce a negative test that is less than 48 hours old.
The checks on the German side of the Moselle crossing are expected to be less strict, said a German interior ministry spokesman.
Germany has grown increasingly concerned in recent weeks about the rapid spread of new, more contagious strains of the coronavirus, especially those first detected in Britain and South Africa.
