The Berlin-Mitte health department has stopped investigating Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) for a possible violation of corona isolation regulations. “The health department has not found any illegalities and has completed the procedure,” said the responsible district office at the request of WELT. The situation had previously been examined.
The investigation was triggered by the receipt of at least five reports after the minister fell ill with Corona at the beginning of August and released himself from quarantine early after five days, although his PCR test was still working.
It was not until Thursday afternoon that the WELT AM SONNTAG district office announced that the health department was investigating Lauterbach. The chief of staff takes care of the process. A day later, Lauterbach wrote on Twitter: “Anyone who makes strict rules must also comply with them. Control by the health department is therefore completely ok.”
He pointed out that he had a PCR test with a Ct value of 39 in the test center “for free testing”. His spokesman explained to WELT that Lauterbach had thus fulfilled the RKI recommendations for isolation, according to which a PCR test with a Ct value of over 30 was sufficient for employees in healthcare facilities to be able to resume their work.
However, according to the wording, the Berlin Corona Ordinance requires a “negative result” of a supervised test for free testing and, in contrast to comparable regulations in other federal states, leaves open the Ct value from which this should be the case. In response to a written request from the FDP state deputy, Holger Krestel, the Berlin Senate said: “Therefore, there is no generally applicable threshold value above which a Ct value can always be assessed as negative. Rather, this is to be specified by the examining laboratory and the finding to be validated by a doctor.”
The 1st Chairman of the Professional Association of German Laboratory Doctors, Andreas Bobrowski, explains to WELT: “There is reliable knowledge of when a PCR test is positive, namely up to a Ct value of 40. This corresponds to the value up to which the most PCR tests are approved in Germany. All German laboratories therefore test up to this value. A PCR test with a Ct value in the middle of 30 cannot therefore be presented as ‘negative’.” The RKI also points out in its recommendations that infection with a Ct value of over 30 is unlikely, but possible .
Lauterbach had not gone into quarantine on the orders of the health department, but voluntarily. According to his spokesman, all tests he had done during his illness were unsupervised self-tests, so that the still positive PCR test should have been the first test that would have justified a statutory separation obligation. The question therefore arises as to whether Lauterbach’s quarantine should not have started at this point in the first place.
Regardless of this, the health department has now ended the investigation. It is unclear to what extent the communication between Lauterbach’s office and the authority could help to dispel the allegations. The district office had informed WELT on Thursday afternoon that there had been contact with the Lauterbach office “from the beginning”. The central health department “recently” sent a written request to the Lauterbach office for a better assessment, but there was no answer.
Lauterbach’s spokesman, on the other hand, told WELT on Friday afternoon: “The oral phone call with the health department was weeks ago – close to the first critical press reports about the short isolation period of the minister.” After presenting the facts, one did not have the impression that the health department followed Lauterbach’s procedure would take offense: “Up to the day of renewed reporting today, we also heard nothing more from the authority.”
