688 new corona infections and traffic light movement – coronavirus –

Most of the new infections occurred in Vienna with 266, 103 in Lower Austria and in the other federal states with values ​​in the double digit range. There are currently 472 people in hospital treatment, 100 of them in intensive care units. A week ago there were 78 patients with Covid 19 in intensive care. “We are currently in a situation where we are clearly far from capacity limits,” Anschober stressed at a press conference in Vienna.

It is “temporary good news that it has not risen,” emphasized the Health Minister about the new infections in recent days. However: “We have to accept these numbers,” Anschober said. “But it is not only about health protection, all this has a huge impact on our economic development,” warned the Minister of Health. “The higher the number of infections, the higher the unemployment rate threatens,” he said.

After the new traffic light, the Carinthian region of Hermagor is among the high-risk districts for the first time, due to a cluster that was created in the course of a herd of cattle. Neusiedl am See in Burgenland, Sankt Pölten Stadt, Mistelbach and Scheibbs in Lower Austria and Hallein in Salzburg have also been upgraded from yellow to orange. There was positive news for three districts: Kufstein in Tyrol was downgraded from orange to yellow. Eferding in Upper Austria and Deutschlandsberg are now green again instead of yellow.

At the moment 2.7 percent of infections in Austria that are related to a group of cases can be assigned to the education sector. This emerges from the current analysis of the epidemiologist from the Agency for Food Safety (AGES). Half of the infected people who can be assigned to the group have been infected at home since September 1. “Household groups continue to dominate,” said AGES chief epidemiologist Daniela Schmid. About half of the total cases can be assigned to groups.

Meanwhile, Vienna is changing its strategy to test suspicious cases, specifically bicycle messengers. They will visit people with symptoms at home and initiate the investigation. A prerequisite for the fact that medical personnel are no longer needed is a change in the test method. In these cases only gargle tests are used. In case of symptoms, you should first contact the health telephone number 1450.

In Lower Austria, rapid tests for employees and companies were fully underway on Friday. In Mödling’s “starting district”, the Center for Social and Occupational Medicine (AMZ) received 400 registrations at the beginning of Thursday, the State Chamber of Labor and Commerce announced. The Wiener Neudorf rapid test lane is fully operational. In a company in the Mödling district, 53 cases have been registered, compared to 18 the day before.

The effective breeding number for Austria is now below 1.0 for the first time since August 10. An infected person recently infected an average of 0.99 other people, as estimates by the Agency for Food Safety and Health (AGES) and TU Graz show. “The number of new cases diagnosed every day continues to increase,” it was emphasized. in the update posted on the AGES homepage on Friday afternoon.

A replay number of 1.0 means that another new infection is activated per case. In theory, this results in a constant number of new infections every day, that is, an endemic spread of the virus. However, AGES noted that the actual number of views says nothing about the daily number of cases. These had recently settled at a “high level” with 600 to 800 new infections per day.

The vice president of the Pharmaceutical Wholesalers Association (PHAGO), Bernd Grabner, asked this Friday to put the coordination of vaccine distributions “in one hand.” This lesson should be drawn from the handling of this year’s flu vaccine and should be kept in mind with regard to a future corona vaccine. The leader of the SPÖ, Pamela Rendi-Wagner, announced a parliamentary request for the acquisition of the flu vaccine and demanded this free of charge for all Austrians, not only in the childhood vaccination program.