Germany reckons with second wave risk

The working conditions of slaughterhouses are coming under scrutiny as they emerge as hotbeds for infections. A regional lockdown announced Tuesday affecting more than 500,000 locals near Germany’s industrial heartland offers a laboratory for how Europe can manage new outbreaks of COVID-19. That includes thorny questions of how to administer those measures in local communities and whom to blame for contagion. 'At the moment it's a local outbreak,' said Ralf Reintjes, professor of epidemiology and surveillance at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. But if the approach fails in Gütersloh and in other towns such as Göttingen, where a tower block is in quarantine, he warned, Germany will 'probably have a second wave.'