German Chancellor Angela Merkel puts on her face mask due to the coronavirus pandemic during her visit to Germany’s most populated federal state, North Rhine-Westphalia, in Dusseldorf on Tuesday. Germany has got 226,831 COVID-19 confirmed cases, according to the Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday night. Photo: AP

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders of Germany's 16 states are expected Tuesday to extend and tighten a partial lockdown beyond January, as fears grow over virus variant strains believed to be more contagious.

Germany shuttered restaurants, leisure and sporting facilities in November, then expanded the shutdown in mid-December to include schools and most shops to halt runaway growth in new coronavirus infections.

The measures ordered until the end of January have brought about a "flattening of the infections curve," said Merkel's spokesperson Steffen Seibert, noting also that the number of patients in intensive care had also fallen slightly.

"This trend is cautiously positive and a success of the restrictions of the last weeks," he said.

"But it only brings us to the point where we still have a long way to go before we can say we have the infections under control," he added.

Virus variants first seen in Britain and South Africa also posed major risks to whether the falling infections trend could be sustained, added Seibert. The crisis talks between Merkel and state premiers were brought forward by a week because of the virus variants.

Germany got out of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic relatively well, but a second wave hit Europe's biggest economy hard.

New infections have soared far above the 50 per 100,000 people incidence rate threshold set by the government. And just on January 14, the country saw a new high in daily deaths at 1,244.

Seibert noted that the incidence rate was still at over 130 per 100,000, and that Germany "must more quickly" bring that down to 50.

He would not be drawn on specific measures that could be decided on Tuesday, but said discussions would surround "issues like working from home, medical masks, public transport - not about the complete halt of public transport but about reducing contact in them."