Ban on contact within your own four walls?

Lisa Vogel studied departmental journalism with a focus on medicine and biosciences at Ansbach University and deepened her journalistic knowledge in the master's degree in multimedia information and communication. This was followed by a traineeship in the editorial team. Since September 2020 she has been writing as a freelance journalist for

More posts by Lisa Vogel All content is checked by medical journalists.

To contain the corona virus, the federal and state governments decided on an extensive ban on contact at the weekend. Apart from people with whom you live together anyway, a maximum of two people are allowed to be together "in public space". However, when it comes to the actual implementation, this regulation raises questions.

In the guidelines agreed on Sunday, citizens are expressly asked to "reduce contact with other people outside of their own household to an absolutely necessary minimum".

Does this two-person rule also apply to your own home?

When asked, a spokesman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior emphasized that this regulation also extends to the area of ​​one's own home - even if this is not explicitly mentioned in the guidelines. However, the federal states are responsible for the legally binding implementation, so that the individual provisions can vary.

Is it therefore also forbidden according to the guidelines to visit one's own parents?

Only members of their own household are excluded from the two-person rule of the guidelines - and therefore no adult children who no longer live with their father and mother. Since "emergency care" and "help for others" should still be possible, exceptions are certainly conceivable in individual cases - but these would then have to be well justified, because violations of the guidelines could result in severe fines. Stopping by a befriended couple for a glass of wine or a visit from the children's playmate do not fall under possible exception rules. Couples who live in different apartments are usually still allowed to visit each other.

Do you have to expect inspection visits from the police now?

Probably not - even if the Federal Ministry of the Interior points out that the controls and sanctions are the responsibility of the individual federal states. But at the weekend, the Prime Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Malu Dreyer (SPD), admitted that personal contacts between people could hardly be controlled and that it was more of an appeal: "Of course we cannot check it - unless it is so a party that you can hear the music everywhere. " (lv / dpa)

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