As Omicron looms, Germany’s new covid tsar girds for battle

KARL LAUTERBACH has his work cut out. The newly appointed German health minister, an epidemiologist trained at Harvard, took over last week at a time when infection rates from covid-19 are hitting . Some overwhelmed hospitals have had to dispatch critically ill patients to other states. And the probably much more infectious , which has only just begun to spread, threatens to make all this much worse.Throughout the pandemic Mr Lauterbach has been one of the most prominent voices sounding the alarm, and in some ways reality is now even gloomier than his dire predictions. Around 1m Germans are currently infected with covid-19. On December 10th 510 Germans died with or of the disease. Around a quarter of those deaths were in Saxony, the state with the lowest rate of vaccination.