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Germany agrees €2.5bn package to help revive Covid-hit culture sector
A €2.5bn (£2.15bn) package has been agreed by the German government to help the culture industry get back on its feet as the country slowly emerges from a third wave of the Covid pandemic.
The finance minister, Olaf Scholz, has called the package “the biggest cultural subsidy programme” since the end of the second world war.
The coronavirus cultural fund is intended to give organisers of events assurances that they will be compensated if performances and concerts are not able to go ahead as planned, as well as making up for the loss of ticket sales due to reduced seating as a result of social distancing regulations.
Initially the measures will protect events of up to 500 participants, so that if from 1 July an event has to be cancelled, the organiser will be fully compensated. From the end of August, in anticipation of events being able to increase in size, that will go up to 2,000 participants.
The measures, coming as Germany starts to open up after months of tight restrictions, are on top of a multimillion-euro neustart kultur (new start culture) programme announced last year to cover events across the country.
“Life is starting again after a long coronavirus winter,” Scholz said. Monika Grütters, the culture minister, said the fund sent a signal to the cultural industry that its “resuscitation deserves the same amount of effort which is being given to other branches”.
Read more of Kate Connolly’s report from Berlin: Germany agrees €2.5bn package to help revive Covid-hit culture sector
Coronavirus live news: India sees lowest new cases in six weeks; Japan expected to extend restrictions”/>
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Coronavirus live news: India sees lowest new cases in six weeks; Japan expected to extend restrictions”/>
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Coronavirus live news: India sees lowest new cases in six weeks; Japan expected to extend restrictions”/>
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Coronavirus live news: India sees lowest new cases in six weeks; Japan expected to extend restrictions”/>
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Coronavirus live news: India sees lowest new cases in six weeks; Japan expected to extend restrictions”/>
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Coronavirus live news: India sees lowest new cases in six weeks; Japan expected to extend restrictions”/>
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Overcrowding in Victorian hospitals ‘bigger emergency than Covid’, expert warns
Overcrowding in Victoria’s healthcare system is a “bigger public health emergency than Covid”, according to a leading emergency physician who says the state’s doctors and nurses were exhausted even before the latest outbreak.
Victoria is in a seven-day lockdown with 30 cases of community transmission, more than 120 exposure sites, and 15,000 primary and secondary contacts of cases in isolation.
The Australasian College for Emergency Medicine Victoria faculty chair, Dr Mya Cubitt, said on Friday that doctors and nurses in public hospitals had been dreading such a situation because they were still recovering from Victoria’s second wave in 2020.
At its height, there were more than 700 new cases in a single day. There were 768 deaths overall with hundreds of healthcare workers infected.
“We are in the worst crisis that healthcare has faced in many years,” Cubitt said.
“You could even say – and I’d love to speak with [chief health officer Prof] Brett Sutton about this – that the access block and overcrowding of the system is the bigger public health emergency at the moment. Whether we have a Covid outbreak or not, emergency clinicians, and all of the many colleagues that we intersect with in the healthcare system, are under extreme pressure.”
Read more of Melissa Davey’s report here: Overcrowding in Victorian hospitals ‘bigger emergency than Covid’, expert warns
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Coronavirus live news: India sees lowest new cases in six weeks; Japan expected to extend restrictions”/>
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Coronavirus live news: India sees lowest new cases in six weeks; Japan expected to extend restrictions”/>
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