So now it comes after all, the mouth guard duty: In Frankfurt it is already decided thing, the rest of Hesse wants to follow suit tonight. Mayor Peter Feldmann and head of the health department Stefan Majer justified the measure with the resumption of school next week: "We have to introduce a mandatory nose and mouth protection in Frankfurt next Monday, when the first children go back to school, on public transport and when shopping. A simple mouth guard or even a scarf will do," Feldmann and Majer said. "We assume that next week at the latest the city will be full again and therefore we cannot avoid additional precautionary measures. After the lockdown, we have now achieved initial success in the fight against the Corona virus, we must not put this at risk now."
For this reason, Feldmann and Majer urgently appealed to the state and the region to go along with this path, which is still to be decided on Tuesday. The mayor also urged patience. "The distance requirement and hygiene rules continue to apply. We must not slacken our attention now after the first easing measures. The mouth and nose protection is another step towards restoring a degree of normality. Other measures, such as a voluntary Corona app with which chains of infection can be interrupted again, will certainly be necessary in the future." It remains: "Health comes first," said Feldmann.
Health department head Majer pointed out that already both the federal government and the state of Hesse have issued an urgent recommendation to wear a mask. This recommendation will now become mandatory in Frankfurt. "We are now taking a necessary step further, because Frankfurt has a special position in Hesse. But we also know that the citizens expect from us that there are no isolated solutions. That is why we must succeed in finding a joint solution with the region and the state. We have large commuter flows here and the shops, for example on the Zeil, attract many people from the entire Rhine-Main region. We have to take this into account in our considerations. Where it is difficult to keep the distance requirement, a mouth guard must be worn."
"We have great confidence in our population to support this decision. Already they have done so with great discipline. Therefore, we will do without controls for the time being. In the shops anyway, the operators must make sure that the clientele wears a mouth guard," Feldmann and Majer stressed. "We know that we will have to live with this virus for quite some time. Only when there are treatments or vaccine protection can we dispense with the precautions."
"We want to do everything we can to further contain the infections and thus create a sustainable basis for future relaxations," Feldmann and Majer concluded.
