COVID-19 cross-border case and contact tracing activities - experiences and lessons learnt, Germany, April-December 2020.

Background: Interruption of transmission chains has been crucial in the COVID-19 response. The Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) coordinated cross-border case and contact tracing activities at the national level by sharing data with German public health authorities (PHA) and other countries. Data on these activities were not collected in the national surveillance system, and thus were challenging to quantify.

Increase in NDM-1 and NDM-1/OXA-48-producing in Germany associated with the war in Ukraine, 2022.

In 2022, German surveillance systems observed rapidly increasing numbers of NDM-1- and NDM-1/OXA-48-producing , which may in part reflect recurring pre-pandemic trends. Among these cases, however, a presence in Ukraine before diagnosis was frequently reported. Whole genome sequencing of 200 isolates showed a high prevalence of sequence types ST147, ST307, ST395 and ST23, including clusters corresponding to clonal dissemination and suggesting onward transmission in Germany.