Berlin Now Requires Negative COVID Test For Entry Into Non-Essential Businesses

By Joe Martino | Collective Evolution

In society right now, we’re not having open and honest conversations, and it’s driving division like we’ve never seen before. Allow me to explain. People have a great deal of questions regarding COVID-19, and those questions are not honestly being explored in mass culture. And while some of the doubts and questions are in fact unfounded and perhaps paranoid, other questions are founded in science or are at least very grounded inquiry – so why are ALL questions being painted with the “unhinged conspiracy” brush?

For example, people are wondering why COVID treatments like Ivermectin or HCQ are not being focused on more, leaving the only treatment option a vaccine. If the pandemic is indeed so bad as we’re told, why wouldn’t we be excited about treatment options that have been shown to work? Why are we not giving mainstream media platforms to doctors and scientists who are urging governments to these well studied treatments? As more and more people witness denial or censorship of these options, they begin to turn to conspiracy because they cannot understand why they are being told there is a deadly disease all while being told we can’t use treatments that aren’t a vaccine.

Then as we see measures on people’s freedoms increase, the emotions fly as people don’t feel heard in raising questions in the overall narrative.

What Happened

As of March 31st, a negative COVID test is now required for citizens of Berlin to enter into non-essential shops. This measure also applies to visits to the hairdresser or museums, but not to essential businesses like supermarkets, pharmacies or drugstores.

In early March 2021, and agreement between the German federal government and its states allowed eased restrictions providing COVID case levels stayed below the metric of 100 new infections per 100,000 within 7 days. Right now in Berlin the value has sits at about 138.6 and has for several days. There is still a lack of clarity around how many of these cases are asymptomatic.

The way this functions is when you go to visit a store that requires a test, you must have proof of a negative COVID test in hand in order to enter or be serviced.

Germany also will now require travellers to present a negative COVID test for entry into the country.

Why It Matters

Greater surveillance and measures are coming in ways we likely could have only imagined in sci-fi movies. While humans can sometimes be reluctant to change, that at first sounds bad, but ends up being good later on. When it comes to much of the COVID measures we’ve seen, I’m not sure people want to get comfortable with what’s being presented. While the promises of a return to normal are there, the goalpost seems to always be pushed, while other ‘experts’ claim normal will never be seen again.

What happens in one major city in the world tends to be a case study for what might come to other cities around the world. This can actually be a very positive thing when testing out new ideas, but in the case of COVID measures, people are feeling that a tested measure in one country means a loss of freedom in their own in a few weeks to come. This reveals that people don’t want a loss to their freedoms, which is normal, so the question we must come back to: is the danger of the virus or threat to our systems worth the measures we’re taking? A big question of course. But even bigger might be, if the systems are at such a threat, perhaps the systems are not resilient and haven’t been for a long time. After all, can we really say that ‘normal’ was creating a thriving and healthy world? I personally don’t think so.

Those that feel the virus presents a serious danger might ask, shouldn’t we be giving up our freedoms for the safety of all people? And this is where the frustration begins between differing perspectives as not all of us have heard the same information about COVID and thus see it as something different. We don’t have an agreed upon set of facts about things PCR testing, asymptomatic spread of COVID, treatments for COVID-19 and so on. – This is the case not just with everyday citizens but with experts also.

Based on evidence we might have each explored, there are some people in any given community who feel COVID is extremely dangerous, and others who feel it’s similar, but more intense, than a seasonal flu. How are those two sets of people supposed to communicate when the foundation for their discussion is completely different? Are we even recognizing how each other feels and where our ideas came from when we have these debates?

The Takeaway

The events playing out at an everyday level invite a deeper inquiry into how our decisions are made and how our world functions. Inevitably there is complexity in all of this and judging people’s position on COVID measures is not a simple “these people are all sheep” or “these people are all conspiracy theorists”, it goes much deeper than these judgements.

This article (Berlin Now Requires Negative COVID Test For Entry Into Non-Essential Businesses) was originally published on Collective Evolution and is published under a Creative Commons license.