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The nervousness can be clearly felt, also among the officers of the NBC defense school of the Austrian Armed Forces in Korneuburg, north of Vienna: they expect stress in the run-up to Christmas. An imminent big operation casts its shadow.
Starting on Wednesday, December 2, an unprecedented experiment in the fight against the coronavirus will begin in Austria, in which soldiers from the armed forces play a key role: verifying the largest possible proportion of the almost nine million people, known as “mass testing”. counting population. First in Vienna, and then from Vorarlberg and Tyrol, where the situation is most critical, east to the Hungarian border, an antigen test will be used to find out how many Austrians carry the virus and have no idea about it. Individual professional groups also receive preferential treatment in all areas: first teachers, then police officers and people in the care sector.
The planned massive tests are “the official admission of the government that it has lost control over contact tracing”, that is, tracing the infection chains, judges in the “press” specialist journalist Köksal Baltaci. Meanwhile, it is no longer even possible to locate the so-called “patient zero”, that is, the source of an infection, in one out of every five cases. With a huge logistical effort, the government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is now trying to make up for what has been lost.
Concern about winter tourism and Christmas
In terms of population, more than twice as many people in Austria are currently infected with the virus compared to Germany. The government’s concern over pre-Christmas business, winter tourism, and Christmas in the family is understandable. But it seems as if the chancellery is weaving a pretty hot needle when trying to get an entire country tested for antigen.
Participation should take place on a voluntary basis, unlike the field test in Slovakia, where a curfew was threatened for those who refused to take the test. It is also unclear where tens of thousands of medically trained personnel could be hired to perform the tests in the shortest time possible. And above all: what should happen after a positive result. So is there a second antigen test or a significantly more reliable PCR test?
In a comparable massive test in South Tyrol, which the Austrians observed at close range under the direction of Major General Rudolf Striedinger, nearly one percent of those tested tested positive. In terms of the entire Austrian population, it would be almost 90,000 infected people, whose contacts would urgently need to be located. Even if only half the population between Kitzbühel and Karawanken decides to participate, the whole thing remains a difficult logistical challenge to master.
It is also likely that the number of test objectors may jeopardize the usefulness of the entire project. On the one hand, there are those skeptics who fear they will have to be quarantined for a positive result and thus be scammed out of Christmas. And there are, on the other hand, notorious anti-mask opponents, conspiracy theorists, fundamental critics of the course of government, who show little inclination to participate.
»Massive tests! I already heard that! We are turned into cattle “, writes Marlene Streeruwitz foams in” profil “:” The idea of the people as herd is the result of an undemocratic Catholic pastoral sentiment that sees the herd as an informal “we” with an insidious sense of mission raising objections further tangible – a negative test result could be seen as a positive signal to intensify the Christmas fun, resulting in a nice post-Christmas present; In contrast, an erroneously positive test would force healthy people to self-quarantine during the holidays.
“Big projects are always learning projects,” admits Health Minister Rudolf Anschober of the Greens, with his own penchant for disarming honesty and optimism. “We must seize every opportunity to avoid further lockdowns,” says Chancellor Kurz, even if “mass testing is not a panacea.”
It seems as if the rulers of Vienna are still rummaging through the fog.
