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Crown Massnahmen
St. Gallen ski areas are reopening, although crown numbers aren’t really good
The government of St. Gallen has decided to reopen the ski areas starting tomorrow. This is surprising, because the number of corona cases in the canton remains high.
The Flumserberge can reopen their ski area tomorrow Thursday.
Both Appenzell and the canton of Glarus gave the green light on Tuesday. The ski slopes in these regions are open again. As in the great winter sports cantons of Wallis, Bern and Graubünden, which also let their lifts pass during the festive season. Graubünden also announced further relaxation this morning. Restaurants in ski areas will soon be able to reopen their terraces to guests and alcohol will also be allowed again.
Lucerne, on the other hand, is still slowing down. The central Swiss canton wants to reopen its ski areas on January 8 at the earliest. Like the canton of Schwyz, which announced earlier in the week that the occupancy rate in hospitals and the number of cases were still too high to open the ski slopes.
The decision is surprising
Which side would the canton of San Galo take? It is clear from this morning: he also wants to allow me to go back to skiing from tomorrow Thursday. The reason: the occupancy rate at the hospitals, as well as contact tracing and testing capabilities allowed it. This is particularly good news for the big three ski areas Flumserberge, Pizol and Wildhaus, which recently pushed for a quick reopening.
However, the decision is surprising, especially in view of current epidemiological developments. Although the number of cases in the canton of St. Gallen has fallen by almost 20 percent compared to two weeks ago, the canton still has the second highest value in Switzerland, behind Ticino, with 750 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants in the last two weeks.
By way of comparison: the large winter sports cantons of Graubünden, Bern and especially Valais show significantly lower figures. Furthermore, the fewer cases in St. Gallen should be treated with caution, as significantly fewer tests were conducted during the Christmas holidays than in previous weeks. Also, it is still unclear how the holidays, when more people joined, will affect the spread of the virus.
Even the canton of Lucerne, which keeps its ski areas closed for at least another week, is better than St. Gallen in terms of the number of cases.
Very high positivity rate in St. Gallen
The R value, which is also important for decision-making, has once again been below 1 in the canton of St. Gallen for a few days, which means that the number of cases could continue to decrease in the coming days.
What’s not really good, however, is the still very high positivity rate of around 20 percent. Here, St. Gallen still has the worst value of all the cantons. This means that people in eastern Switzerland are significantly less likely to be tested than in other regions of Switzerland, and the number of unreported corona cases is likely to be proportionally higher.
On Tuesday, the federal task force was quite skeptical about the reopening of ski areas in cantons with a high number of cases. In principle, the risk of infection on ski slopes is small, said task force leader Martin Ackermann, but it leads to greater mobility “and brings people together who would not look like this.”
It is now important to do everything possible to get out of the risk zone and reduce the number of cases to avoid a third wave, especially in the face of the new mutation of Britain’s virus, which is much more contagious.
