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Police check woman’s vaccine certificate
The Austrian government has taken the unprecedented step of imposing a stay-at-home order for those with no proof of immunisation. Photograph: LPD / Dietrich/LPD/Dietrich
The Austrian government has taken the unprecedented step of imposing a stay-at-home order for those with no proof of immunisation. Photograph: LPD / Dietrich/LPD/Dietrich

‘No way around it’: Austrians queue for jabs as unvaccinated told to stay home

This article is more than 2 years old

In Linz, jab willingness is rising as police check Covid passports – but confusion remains on what is essential travel

On a street of shops in the Austrian city of Linz, a stone’s throw from the winding Danube river, two police officers in navy-blue uniforms and peaked white caps stop random passersby to check their vaccine passports.

Elderly shoppers rummage around in their handbags and comply with a smile, but a fortysomething woman with a nose piercing is less forthcoming: she says she left her immunisation certificate on the kitchen table as she had to dash across town to see a dentist.

When the woman fails to provide proof of her medical appointment, the officers ask her to head home, though they decline to take down details. “This is a state of complete madness,” she says as she continues on her original northward journey.

Since Monday, about 2 million unvaccinated people in Austria are facing severe restrictions on their free movement after the conservative-led government took the unprecedented step of trying to suppress a powerful fourth wave of Covid-19 with a stay-at-home order for those with no proof of immunisation.

Under the “lockdown for the unvaccinated”, those who have declined to take the jab and are found to have left their home for non-essential reasons can face fines of €500, rising to €1,450 if they fail to comply with checks.

The measure has attracted worldwide attention, as countries across the globe are wondering if they can battle a seasonal resurgence of the virus through vaccines alone.

In Germany, which has a comparable vaccine uptake (68%) to Austria (66%) and where the head of the disease control agency warned this week that the real number of new daily cases could be up to three times the 50,000 that showed up in tests, some politicians have suggested following the example set by its southern neighbour.

Others fear the lockdown of the unvaccinated could set a dangerous precedent, enforcing a segregation on medical grounds in an already polarised society. In Austria, the step has been criticised not just by the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) but also the liberal NEOS. The former Olympic skier Felix Gottwald, a national sporting icon, has said the law reminds him of his country’s darkest National Socialist past.

Further still, medical experts fear it may also prove ineffective in fighting the pandemic, as authorities struggle to police the rules the government has imposed.

Since the start of the week, police in Upper Austria have carried out about 5,000 spot checks a day. Photograph: LPD / Dietrich

In Linz, Austria’s third-biggest city, this week’s partial lockdown, as well as proof-of-immunity requirements in restaurants and bars introduced a week earlier, are already having one visible effect: on Wednesday morning, a rapidly growing queue had formed at the walk-in vaccine centre inside a shopping centre on Landstraße.

Thomas Draxler, a bus driver in his 50s queueing for his first jab of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, said he was not a militant anti-vaxxer but had held out until now “because I haven’t had any run-ins with the virus”. But regular testing requirements for the unvaccinated had worn him down. “Now there’s no way around it”.

From a legal point of view, driving up vaccination rates is only a desired side-effect of the partial lockdown. To survive challenges in court, the new measure also has to prove that it is suited to protect the healthcare system from a surge of Covid-19 patients.

Lining up for his booster shot to the back of the queue, Maximilian Scherlacher justified the measure to restrict the movement of unvaccinated people in similar fashion. “I do think it’s fair,” said the 39-year-old, who is married to a hospital worker. “What would have been unfair is if we did not try to protect medical personnel working in emergency care and ill people who can’t get hospital beds because they occupied by unvaccinated Covid patients”.

Upper Austria, of which Linz is the capital, experienced relative mild earlier waves of the virus but is now one of the Alpine republic’s Covid hotspots. At 60.8%, it also has the lowest vaccination rate of its nine states.

Austria: number of new coronavirus cases per day

“A year ago, we laughed at Donald Trump for suggesting you could treat corona by injecting disinfectant,” Scherlacher said. “Now we see it’s not that different over here.”

For Austria’s stay-at-home order for the unvaccinated to be compatible with the country’s constitution, it must be justifiable from a medical point of view. Since vaccinations reduce the risk of catching and therefore passing on the virus, even if less effectively so over time, some scientists say this is the case.

It also needs to work, argued Karl Stöger, a professor of constitutional law at Vienna university. “If the partial lockdown ends up being an intelligence test for those looking for loopholes how to evade fines, then that’s not good enough”, Stöger said. “A measure that doesn’t work must not come into action”.

Since the start of the week, police in Upper Austria have carried out about 5,000 spot checks a day in the streets – none of them in people’s private homes – and detected 63 breaches of the new regulations. But even law enforcement officers concede working out whether a person walking around town is engaged in essential or inessential activity is at times impossible.

The list of exemptions is long: unvaccinated people are still allowed to go to work, visit their partners, go for recreational walks and go shopping for food or other essential supplies. Asked whether the roasted chestnuts sold at the ubiquitous stalls on Landstraße counted as sustenance or leisure, a police spokesperson said: “That’s a good question.”

Even the right to freedom of assembly is excluded from the lockdown rule: on Tuesday, police allowed a 600-strong anti-vaxxer protest outside the Wels-Grieskirchen clinic to go ahead.

“Of course we can’t carry out comprehensive controls”, said another Linz police spokesperson, David Furtner. “We are reminding people that rules apply even when the police isn’t present.”

On Friday, the national government conceded that minimising the movements of the unvaccinated alone would not suffice to flatten the curve. From Monday, every citizen in Austria will go into their third general lockdown of the pandemic for at least ten days. From February 2022, the government plans to make vaccinations mandatory across the country.

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