German town’s ‘day pass’ gambit offers alternative to Covid restrictions

With its narrow, cobbled streets of half-timbered houses and jaunty turrets, Tübingen in southwest Germany is a picture-perfect backdrop for a Grimm’s fairytale.

And as temperatures hit 24 degrees on Wednesday, pandemic wishes have come true for the 90,000 residents of this university town, 40km south of Stuttgart.

Pushed by the city’s Green Party mayor, Boris Palmer, Tübingen has started a pilot project to move beyond lockdown.

Palmer’s modest proposal has reopened the city’s shops, theatres, museums and more to anyone carrying a negative test result in the form of a “Tübingen Day-Pass”.

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On his daily rounds now, the 48-year-old with a distinctive spiky mane is bombarded with shouts of thanks from residents and business owners for his pragmatic approach to the year-old pandemic.

Every morning a queue forms outside Tübingen’s pretty 15th-century town hall, one of half a dozen rapid test centres around the city.

Among their number, armed with their day passes, are Karla and Horst Reiniger: ready for a day of shopping and a meal in the spring sunshine.

“I had to wait 90 minutes in all for the test and result,” said Horst to local broadcaster SWR, “but sitting at home since November was started to get me down.”

Overseeing the model project is local health official Lisa Federle. The medical doctor says the “Tübinger model” is about giving people a break from restrictions that many are no longer adhering to strictly anyway.

Some 50,000 tests have been carried out in the last two weeks and, in recent days, fewer than three out of every 1,000 tests has been positive.

“I think it’s far safer to meet outside after you’ve been tested, than meeting people in your home,” said Dr Federle.

In addition to the tests, local medical students are carrying out randomised, anonymous surveys on test candidates. Their hope is that by collating details about each person’s daily life and recent behaviour, they can identify criteria that may have contributed to infection.

This week the city has announced it was extending the project by another two weeks to April 18th, news welcomed by many – but not all.

On Sunday, chancellor Angela Merkel, who tried and failed to impose a nationwide Easter lockdown to break a rising third wave of infection, warned on national television that “testing and shopping is not the answer”.

Incidence rate

Other cities of Tübingen’s scale, such as Weimar in the east, have launched similar day passes. But fears are growing that Tübingen could yet become a victim of its own success.

In the last weeks since the day-pass model began, Tübingen’s seven-day incidence rate has quadrupled to nearly 79 per 100,000 of population.

That is still below the 100 mark of Germany’s“emergency brake”, above which lockdowns are once again the order of the day.

But with rising numbers of day trippers, Tübingen triggered its own emergency brake and revoked for the Easter weekend the usual 3,000 daily contingent of passes for non-residents.

There have been cases, too, of residents passing on their tickets to others, prompting the city to upgrade passes from simple pieces of paper to festival-style armbands with personalised QR codes.

For now, mayor Boris Palmer is standing by his “Tübingen model”, predicting that it will help rescue his town’s businesses while uncovering hidden infection chains.

“We knew that the incidence rate would rise,” he said this week, “but to date it is all still within what was to be expected.”