New Chancellor of Austria announces end of coronavirus lockdown for Sunday

The new Federal Chancellor of Austria, Karl Nehammer, announced this Tuesday in Vienna that the current confinement – in force since last November 22 to stop the exponential growth of infections of coronavirus– will end this Sunday, at least for vaccinated people.

SIGHT: Austria moves to impose mandatory vaccination as the only way to fight coronavirus

“There will be an opening. The question is not if we end the confinement but how we will do it, “said the conservative in his first press conference since he took office on Monday.

Apart from commerce, he referred to gastronomy, hotels and other sectors, always with adequate security measures and for people immunized against the coronavirus.

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Austria In November, it was one of the European countries hardest hit by the fourth wave of the pandemic, with an incidence of infection of more than a thousand cases in seven days per 100,000 inhabitants.

The experts and the government itself attribute this situation to the modest percentage of vaccination, which after an intense campaign and with the announcement of the mandatory vaccine from next February, barely exceeds 70% of the population.

After the peak of the wave two weeks ago, with more than 15,000 daily infections, with more than half a million PCR tests performed per day among its 8.9 million inhabitants, the authorities today reported 4,233 new infections in the last 24 hours .

At the same time, 77 deaths were registered due to complications with covid-19, raising the total to 12,921 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

There are currently 670 people in the intensive care units of hospitals, more than a third of the capacities in these units.

The incidence in seven days – the parameter used in Austria – today stands at 531 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.

Details about a possible opening of the activities will be announced this Wednesday after a meeting between the central government and the governors of the nine federal states of the country.

A few weeks before the start of the Christmas, the tourism sector, one of the most important in Austria, calls for an early opening, to save the winter season.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists often travel to the Austrian Alps in the winter months, especially from countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

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Deshawn