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The neighboring country is imposing a curfew and closing public life to avoid overloading the health system. But the fatigue of the Crown is great and criticism of the government is equally fierce.
Bitter moments: Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his Health Minister Rudolf Anschober (right) announce the renewed shutdown.
Austria will enter the second lockdown after spring on Tuesday. “If we don’t act now, there will be an overload of intensive care capabilities,” warned Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. As announced on Saturday, this will temporarily apply until the end of November.
Curfew and closings
With some exceptions, cultural institutions and sports facilities must now close. The same goes for hotels. Restaurants can only offer take away food. Kindergartens and primary schools, on the other hand, will remain open, universities and high school are switching to digital teaching. Religious events and demonstrations are still allowed under certain conditions.
Between 8 pm and 6 am, there will also be a curfew in Austria starting next week. The only reasons for leaving home during this time are imminent danger, assistance, family and work obligations, meeting basic needs, and relaxation. In general, only people from two households can meet.
The situation in Austria is even less dramatic than in Switzerland, not to mention neighboring Central and Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic. The number of new infections is high, more than 5,000 a day, but deaths are still low and the well-developed health system is coping with the situation.
But Health Minister Rudolf Anschober warned on Saturday that with the current exponential increase, the capacity limit would be reached in mid to late November. In the last week alone, the number of corona patients in intensive care units increased by more than a hundred cases to 265. This was the peak of the first wave. In terms of new infections and hospitalizations, it is long overdue.
Comparison with martial law
The lockdown is a bitter pill for Austria, especially since Chancellor Kurz praised not only his own crisis management in the spring, but also the path of the “New Normal” as an international model. Reactions at home and abroad were correspondingly harsh to malicious. The liberal Neos party compared curfews to martial law and, along with the other opposition parties, criticized the government for being undemocratic and not transparent.
Sebastian Kurz also referred to the fatigue of the population for the crown, who expressed the hope that the people still adhere to the restrictions. However, the fact that the pandemic in Austria has not reached a life-threatening level in spring or today makes it difficult to convince. For example, there is more skepticism about the Corona mask and app requirement than in the rest of Europe.
But this is just one symptom of deeper uncertainty after nearly eight months of the pandemic. The government of Vienna and the federal states reacted to the second wave in an equally inconsistent and overwhelming way as the rest of Europe. In addition, there was a political setback that caused significant projects such as the Corona traffic light, which should have shown a regionally different picture of the contagion process, to fail spectacularly. The result was a mosaic of measures that made any overview impossible for ordinary people.
Generalized corona fatigue
The spokeswoman for the Corona Commission, epidemiologist Daniela Schmid, said self-criticism in an interview that authorities had not communicated. The population is fed up with the topic: “A little sausage has returned, nothing is accepted anymore.” This is especially true for young adults who are hardly willing to change their behavior.
However, politicians also convey Corona’s impression of weariness. The Minister of Health recently evoked the spirit of solidarity that prevailed in the spring radio appearances, but sounded rather helpless in view of the widespread laissez-faire attitude. Until now, most Austrians have followed the rules in public, but they don’t take them very seriously in the private and semi-private sector.
Figures from the Agency for Food Safety and Health, which to date have tracked nearly half of the total 100,000 corona cases, also show that most infections occur in homes and during leisure time. Therefore, the Minister of the Interior now also bans private parties in which the festivities had been increasingly postponed in view of the strict requirements in clubs and bars.
Delicate interventions
However, it is a narrow path that the authorities are moving: in Austria, privacy is a commodity that enjoys a high level of protection, especially because of its National Socialist past. The government learned how delicate the interventions are when the constitutional court lifted several entry bans and requirements for restaurants and shops. The lawyers for the Ministry of Health had to endure the accusation of having worked carelessly, since many of the objections were predictable.
The government was paralyzed by fear of another setback and the existential dilemma between the rule of law and effective crisis management. For weeks there have been rumors of closure plans in Vienna that have been denied with little credibility. There was also talk of a power struggle for the internal government: Chancellor Kurz wanted to go further than Anchober.
However, the front lines do not seem so clear, as the criticism, especially from the Chamber of Commerce close to the ÖVP, is fierce. “The economy has to function at its best,” demanded its president Harald Mahrer, a brief confidant, on Thursday. Companies have invested heavily in protection concepts and should not be punished now. Many entrepreneurs were also frustrated by unclear and ever-changing government guidelines.
Economic and social costs
The bitterness is particularly great in economically important tourism, which had pushed for the rescue of the winter season and is now losing the last of its guests. Restaurants and retailers employing more than 800,000 people can stay open. But they fear more dramatic sales losses due to exit restrictions. They must be 80 percent compensated by the state. However, in the spring, many companies found that poorly provided aid only flowed slowly.
The magnitude of the economic and social costs of the new blockade depends largely on its duration. Even Sebastian Kurz had nothing to counter the sense of lack of prospects that is slowly but surely spreading in Austria. He did not know if the measures could be relaxed as planned in early December, he admitted on Saturday. Nor did he rule out a tightening.
