A slim majority of Germans say their lives have not changed drastically despite the effects of coronavirus lockdowns, according to researchers.
A poll of 4,069 people in the US, Germany, France and the UK found that 52 per cent of German respondents said that the pandemic had changed their lives “not too much” or “not much at all”.
In neighbouring France, 67 per cent of people said that the pandemic had changed “a great deal or fair amount” of their everyday lives.
In the UK, 70 per cent of respondents felt the same way.
The ratio was highest in the US, where more than 450,000 people have died of coronavirus, the world’s highest Covid-19 death toll. Seventy-four per cent of American respondents said their lives had changed a great deal during the pandemic.
Across the board, people felt their lives had changed, especially as the pandemic entered the winter months, reflecting record daily death tolls and renewed lockdowns in much of Europe and the UK.
The poll by the US-based Pew Research Centre came as a German politician suggested that its current lockdown could soon end.
Health Minister Jens Spahn acknowledged that public anger at the country’s two-month hard lockdown was rising.
"We can't stay in this hard lockdown all winter. We would not tolerate that well as a society," he told the Funke media group.
Scientists, however, said that social restrictions could not ease while the infection rate in the country was still high.
The Federal Association of German Public Health Officers last week called for a Covid-19 elimination strategy.
However, Mr Spahn said that the goal for Germany remained "to prevent the health system from being overburdened – and not to avoid every infection".
"To get it down to zero infections and keep it that way comes at a disproportionate cost in other areas of life," he said.
Meanwhile, authorities in Sweden plan to launch a digital coronavirus "vaccine passport" by summer, which would allow vaccinated people to travel and participate in other activities, ministers said.
Sweden is the second European country to outline immunity passport plans after Denmark announced similar plans on Wednesday.
In the UK, ministers were under pressure to pinpoint a start date for its hotel quarantine system.
The hotels are designed to keep out mutant variants of coronavirus but the chief executive of the UK’s largest airport hotel chain said the industry had been “kept in the dark” over the government’s plan since it was announced nearly two weeks ago.
“In any normal company, if you went out and announced a programme nationally, you hadn't thought about how you were going to plan it, and you hadn’t spoken to the people involved, I’m not sure I’d have a job,” Best Western Hotels chief executive Rob Paterson said.
UK Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi said he was unconcerned that the hotels were not yet up and running, because the scheme is not a “silver bullet” in stopping imported coronavirus cases.
Earlier, he said there were about 4,000 variants of coronavirus in the world that British scientists were monitoring.
Meanwhile, the editor of the respected British Medical Journal said that world leaders should be held accountable for the "social murder" inflicted on populations by their mishandling of the pandemic.
"Politicians must be held to account by legal and electoral means, indeed by any national and international constitutional means necessary," BMJ editor Kamran Abbasi said.
"State failures that led us to two million deaths are actions and inactions that should shame us all."
