Austria to allow Xmas skiing but many restrix stay

(2 Dec 2020) Austria will allow skiing to start on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, but will limit the capacity of ski lifts and keep restaurants, bars and hotels largely closed until early January, officials said Wednesday.
It also will require many people entering the country over the Christmas period to go into quarantine.
Austria is currently recording 335 new infections per 100,000 residents over seven days, down from around 600 last month — but still more than twice as many as in neighbouring Germany, which is in a milder partial shutdown.
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said that progress over recent weeks, and the expectation of more before Christmas, allows "cautious" reopening steps. But he said the tourism and catering sectors won't start reopening until Jan. 7.
That will effectively mean that, over the holiday season, skiing is possible in most cases only on day trips for those Austrian residents who live fairly close to the Alps
Kurz said that allowing skiing for locals but keeping the catering sector closed is "absolutely justified."
"Skiing is a sport that takes place in the open air, an individual sport, so epidemiologically it must be assessed differently from catering, where we know that there can time and again be infections," he said.
France and Germany, which has closed ski resorts, are pushing for similar measures to be taken in other European countries, like Italy and Spain, for the Christmas season, though ski resorts are already open in neighbouring Switzerland.
Kurz rejected suggestions that Austria's limited reopening was a response to pressure from abroad.
"We decide according to our infection situation, and our expectation is that we can push down our infections very, very strongly by Christmas," he said.
Austria also plans tougher border controls and quarantine rules in an effort to dissuade people from travelling abroad over the Christmas period.
Austrian residents' summer trips to see relatives in the western Balkans, in particular, were blamed as a significant source of the recent resurgence of infections.
The quarantine rules will be imposed by mid-December and will apply for people coming from countries with a certain level of COVID-19 infections.
The requirement will be for new arrivals to go into quarantine for 10 days, which they can cut short by taking a test after five days, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said.

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