Airbus isolates 500 staff members after Hamburg COVID-19 outbreak

Days after workers at the Hamburg factory of Airbus tested COVID-19 positive, the Aerospace and Defense Company said that it had sent another 500 of its staff into quarantine. The company asserted that the move had been taken as a precautionary measure to prevent the rest of the staff from contracting the lethal infection. According to official data, Airbus employs 12,000 people at its Hamburg-Finkenwerder manufacturing unit, which is located in northern Germany.

Hamburg outbreak

Marking Germany’s latest coronavirus outbreak, 21 Airbus workers in Hamburg tested positive last week. It is not yet confirmed whether they have contracted SARS-CoV-2 or one of its highly spreading mutations. In addendum, authorities are also probing to identify the origin of the outbreak.

Speaking to media reporters, a spokesperson for Airbus stated that the quarantine was ordered on January 22 adding that the company was responsibly coordinating with the German health officials. He also revealed that the company would provide further details into the virus type in the second half of next week.

Hard lockdown 

Germany with 2,147,740 cases and 52,777 fatalities is still battered by the infectious outbreak. Last month, the Angela Merkel administration imposed a hard lockdown to restrict the spread of infection around the festive season. The new rules include complete closure of schools and educational institutes, a limit on personal meetings, a travel ban on people residing in virus hotspots inter alia.  

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This comes as Germany ordered hundreds of doses of the drug that previously cured former US President Donald Trump of coronavirus. While nothing is known about the manufacturers of the “miraculous” treatment yet, German health minister, on January 23, confirmed the deal. Speaking to a local newspaper, Jens Spahn revealed that the country had bought 200,000 doses for a whopping amount of 400 million euros.

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Earlier this month, experts and politicians slammed Germany for not buying enough doses of Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to roll out its immunisation programme. Germany, which recently reported the presence of mutant coronavirus, is a part of EU’s vaccine procurement scheme and is reliant on the bloc’s regulators for granting authorization of the vaccine to prevent COVID-19 infection. 

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