Anyone who, like me, spent holidays in the idyllic Lungau market town of Tamsweg as a child cannot believe their eyes these days: With a seven-day incidence above the 2400 mark, Tamsweg holds the Austria-wide, if not Europe-wide negative record of infections with the coronavirus, according to statistics .
Tamsweg of all places - a place more than a thousand meters high above the sea, with no nightlife, no crowds in overcrowded means of transport.
Horror numbers from the mountains that startle the responsible head of government of the state of Salzburg? Not really. In the middle of last week, Wilfried Haslauer from the Chancellor's party ÖVP refused to take tightened measures against people who have neither been vaccinated nor recovered. With the words: »The virologists would like to lock all Austrians in one room, because they cannot become infected and cannot infect anyone. But then people will just die of depression or starve or die of thirst. "
Since Monday, there has been a lockdown for unvaccinated people across Austria.
This was preceded by months of hesitation and party-politically motivated tussle - between the federal government and the states, but also between the coalition partners in Vienna.
Loyalists to ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz recently ruffed the Green Minister of Health, Wolfgang Mückstein, who was campaigning for stricter measures.
Search for Zechern without a vaccination certificate
The fighting of the political class on the backs of a population that has already suffered more than 11,000 corona deaths is disturbing. While the search for drinkers and bargain hunters without a vaccination certificate has been going on nationwide since Monday, the consumer protection association (VSV) is promoting its crowdfunding campaign "Justice for Ischgl Victims". According to the VSV statistics, 32 women and men paid for their 2020 vacation in the Tyrolean après-ski Dorado Ischgl with their lives. The “multi-organ failure” of the Austrian authorities must be clarified in court, complain the consumer advocates - so far without any noticeable success.
Next Saturday, after being closed for 600 days, the celebrations will take place again for the first time at one of Ischgl's breeding sites, at Bernhard Zangerl's notorious “Kitzloch” party bar.
He wants to forego "especially primitive songs" for sound reinforcement in the future, says the operator, but otherwise, thanks to the 2G rule, "après-ski will be the same as it used to be".
The fact that all of Austria has been a high-risk area for incoming Germans since Sunday is an "atmospheric catastrophe" for their industry, says the head of the Austrian Hotel Association.
From a purely legal point of view, bookings can now be canceled without any problems.
For parents with children under the age of twelve, the travel warning means that they have to send their offspring to quarantine for ten days after returning from Austria.
Ischgl is probably more relaxed than anywhere else.
Before Corona, parents with small children were not part of the core clientele in either the “Kitzloch” or the “Schatzi Bar”.
Social media moment of the week
The communication scientist Fritz Hausjell from the University of Vienna exposed Peter Lewisch, his colleague from the law faculty, as relevant.
Lewisch had tried to refute the criminal charges against ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in an opinion scattered by the ÖVP and accused the investigating prosecutors of serious sloppiness.
It was Hausjell who then reminded us via Twitter that Lewisch had already had reports for ex-Interior Minister Ernst Strasser (later sentenced to three years imprisonment for bribery) and ex-Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser (meanwhile sentenced to eight years imprisonment in the first instance ) had created.
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In Bavaria the disaster applies, in Austria the lockdown comes for the unvaccinated: The pandemic is spiraling out of control on both sides of the border.
A MP in Vienna says: "General practitioners refuse to vaccinate."
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The government is to blame for the predicament - but it is not alone in that.
The corona disaster has many fathers
Kind regards
Walter Mayr
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