The Second Wave
How Austria found itself in another COVID lockdown
Servus!
Austria lost control of the coronavirus. On November 11, the country recorded 9,251 new cases—the worst day of the pandemic to date. On November 13, the seven-day rolling average of new cases hit 843.6 per one million residents. With case numbers rising and intensive care capacity reserved for COVID-19 patients diminishing fast, the Austrian government was left with no choice but to impose a two-and-a-half-week lockdown beginning November 17, shutting down tourism during the ski season and retail a month out from the Christmas holidays.
In the space of a few months, Austria has gone from being the coronavirus poster-child to the sick man of Europe. The first lockdown from mid-March to early May, swiftly reduced the number of new cases recorded daily to a negligible double-digit figure. A system of Kurzarbeit or short-time work shielded a large number of employees during the shutdown. Masks were made available to the public via supermarkets and were to be worn in closed spaces. The Stopp Corona contact tracing app was rolled out. Shops and restaurants re-opened. Austria, it seemed, had entered a comfortable and contended version of the temporary normal.
What happened next, in brief, was the summer. The government pivoted from a strategy of actively controlling and containing the virus’ spread to one of Eigenverantwortung or personal responsibility. Having gone through the trouble of distributing and raising awareness of masks, the compulsion to wear them was repealed in mid-June. In an attempt to save summer tourism, the government not only encouraged Austrians to go on vacation but actively sought tourists from neighboring Germany and Switzerland to occupy its hotel rooms and hiking trails. Austrians summarily left for the beaches of Croatia and returned with the coronavirus.
The summer was a kind of false respite, one which the Austrian government wasted. It used the time to adequately build up neither its testing nor contact tracing capacity. It did not promote use of the Stopp Corona app, whose take up remained low and technology fell behind those of comparable apps. Perhaps its biggest embarrassment was the Corona-Ampel, its district-by-district traffic light coronavirus warning system. Intended to be effective, targeted, and independent, the Ampel was completely toothless, introduced without much in the way of legal underpinning, and subject to party political interference. It may not surprise you to know that every district in Austria is currently at level red or very high risk.
Practical mistakes were accompanied by rhetorical ones—surprising for a chancellor and a government whose paramount obsession is message control. When the first wave struck, Sebastian Kurz told the nation that 100,000 people could die of the virus. (The current death toll stands at 2,408.) At the end of August, he said he could see a ‘light of the tunnel’ and that life would return to normal by the summer of 2021. This attempt to give a sense of perspective, to keep everyone invested in containing the virus, not only led to immense confusion but came across as an invitation to the Austrian people to let their collective guard down. Thus, they did, and by the time Kurz demanded in mid-November an end to almost all social contact, the battle for control had already been lost.
In an excoriating op-ed in the Neuen Zürcher Zeitung, Eric Gujer summarized Austria’s approach to the second wave as a mixture of “Habsburg nonchalance and administrative inaptitude.” The significance of the Austrian case for the rest of the world is that shows precisely how important clear rules and concise messaging are in combatting this virus. When masks are put on, taken off, and put back on again, when restaurants close, then open, and then close again, when the Rule of Ten turns to Six, and then None, and when it’s mass death one minute and a light at tunnel’s end the next, inconsistency creates uncertainty, confusion, and fatigue. The people will cease to listen and, instead, find their own way through the pandemic—with potentially devastating consequences.
In Monday morning’s edition of the New Statesman’s Morning Call, Stephen Bush wrote that “the British government has started to view social distancing solely as something applied from above, when the reality is that it requires passive consent from below to work.” Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator: Change only the name and this story is about you.
Bis bald!
Here Comes The Vaccine
Austrian health authorities announced Tuesday they intend to begin vaccinating the public against the coronavirus in January 2021. Officials outlined a three-phase rollout. The first people to receive the vaccine conceived by Pfizer and BioNTech will be care home residents and workers. In February and March, people over the age of 65 and key workers will be vaccinated, likely using either the Moderna or Astra Zeneca shot. Nationwide vaccination will start in April.
Hallo, Michi!
Vienna’s new city government was sworn in Tuesday morning. Michael Ludwig (Social Democratic Party) will remain the city’s mayor, having formed a coalition with the liberal NEOS, the first coalition of its kind at the state level in Austria. Though the coalition has a majority on the city council, six members of the opposition voted for Ludwig’s nomination to become mayor. The Social Democrats won October’s municipal elections with 41.6 percent of the vote.
Baba, Birgit!
The Social Democrats’ former coalition partner, the Greens, shut their party’s leader out of a formal leadership role on Vienna’s city council in internal elections held last week. Birgit Hebein led the Greens to their best ever result in October, capturing 14.8 percent of the vote, but was denied the posts of minister without portfolio in city government or council faction leader. Hebein was Vienna’s vice-mayor until Tuesday and has been the leader of Vienna’s Greens since June 2019.