While 400 British tourists had been quarantined at a ski resort in Bagnes, a Swiss commune, half of them fled this weekend, local media report.
After the appearance of the much more contagious variant of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom, British nationals had in fact been forced to isolate themselves for ten days.
In the station of Verbier, they were nearly 420 British tourists waiting for the end of this period of isolation in hotels.
But during the night from Saturday to Sunday, 200 of them took advantage of the night to leave their hotel rooms and flee.
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The spokesperson for the municipality, Jean-Marc Sandoz, told the Swiss daily
SonntagsZeitung
that "many of them remained in quarantine for a day before leaving undetected under cover of darkness".
He assures that some would have taken the direction of France.
Tourists no longer answered calls
According to an article in the German daily
Merkur,
relayed by BFMTV, hotel employees realized the departure of their customers because they no longer answered calls made to the rooms and no longer received their meals.
Switzerland, which has 8.6 million inhabitants, has one of the highest contamination rates in Europe for this second wave, with nearly 5,000 new cases and 100 deaths per day.
Swiss Health Minister Alain Berset admitted on Saturday that the Swiss government had been overly optimistic after the first wave of the Covid-19 epidemic by relaxing the restrictions.