FROM OUR MAIL

VIENNA – If there is a place where in Vienna you really risk getting Covid, since the lockdown of the unvaccinated who in practice cannot leave the house except for urgent reasons, the cathedral of Santo Stefano, the heart of the capital. As tourists we struggle to enter: on a weekday morning, there is no Mass, but a snake of hundreds, perhaps a thousand people waiting to enter the left aisle where a vaccination station has been set up without an appointment, open to anyone who has not yet taken their first dose. That is, up to 10 days ago, more than one in three Austrians. There are families, many young people, an elderly person comes out of the aisle on a scooter. No distancing, hours of waiting.

In Austria, at the center of the fourth wave of Covid in Europe, we have been traveling for a week to more than 11 thousand cases per day; to date, 68% of eligible Austrians have received at least the first dose, but only this week, after a summer in which the vaccination campaign has stagnated, which the average of the doses administered was 18 thousand per day. A boom due to the new rule, which from 8 November enters almost everywhere if you do not fall within the 2G rule, if you do not mean genesen, healed no more than six months, or geimpft, ie vaccinated.

An apartheid, protests Marika Orrer, a student in the queue at the Cathedral, who came because otherwise you can no longer do anything, ski or dine out. But not a correct way to impose a campaign on the population. The sentiment it describes was baptized with a neologism, Schnitzelpanik, ie cutlet panic: not getting vaccinated, with the new law, means giving up the intense social life of the capital, made up of coffee, prosecco with canapés, concerts and cutlets; and the upcoming ski season, equally indispensable and in danger, after two winters ago the worst outbreak in the Alps occurs in Ischgl, in Tyrol. On TV yesterday Oliver Fritz, a tourism expert from the national economic research body (the WiFo), announced that not only doctors, but also many owners of ski resorts and hotels are of the opinion that the only possible remedy is a total lockdown. , with closing of the structures at least until Christmas.

For now, however, the (almost) two-speed lockdown of its effects. The Schnitzelpanik for example, it fills the tables of Plachutta, the temple of cutlet but above all of Tafelspitz, the boiled meat loved by Francesco Giuseppe (or so the host says), where a sign at the entrance reads Entrance only with 2G. At dinner time all full. The café in the Schwarzes Kameel center is also full: the weekend ritual, here, of drinking prosecco side by side with strangers at the long counter, and ordering trays of colorful canapes to take home. Impossible distancing, mass cheer
I’m a. Despite the triple —and cumbersome – controls: temperature, green pass and identity document, which web waiters avoid for fakes (on if they can be found for 300 euros). the practice everywhere, after all. For us, this waltz drives customers away, looks up at the manager of a mulled wine kiosk at the Christmas market in Spittelberg, a young neighborhood where almost every street has its own herbal medicine or Heilpraktiker, alternative medicine clinics.

I first Christmas markets they opened last year, and to order a weekend you should go around the block, find an info-point where you can show your green pass and documents, change your money into coupons and then go back to the wine counter. The urge passes. The same process is also used – albeit outdoors – in street kiosks who sell i Ksekrainer, the typical sausage stuffed with cheese, perhaps unhealthy in other ways but closed to non-vaccinated people. The passport, medical or otherwise, is also mandatory in museums: the Leopold hosts an exhibition on the Viennese Golden Age, the early twentieth century, when the epidemic to beware of was tuberculosis. In the windows of the nearby antiquarian Irenaeus Kraus a poster of Progressive advertisement dated 1921, inviting people not to cough in public, to wash your hands a lot, to sterilize the milk before drinking it. As today, everywhere, the signs invite you to wear the FFP2 mask.

They all take it to the shops; it is carried – and screamed without taking it off – by the madmen who launch themselves from the 80 meters high of the Freifallturm to the Prater playground; they take it off just to play, putting it back between one symphony and another, the orchestral players of the Berliner Staatskapelle whoi exhibit at the Musikverein directed by Daniel Baremboim, and had to skip the Milanese leg of the tour, at the beginning of November, precisely due to a case of Covid. At their concert, after a while, almost all the spectators take it off, taking advantage of the impossibility of being reprimanded. Otherwise the reprimand reaches everywhere, and the penalties – 500 euros for managers who do not have the green pass, criminal sentences for those who falsify it – are severe.. Except in a place where everyone is free: the night train that takes us back to Italy, at the end of a tourist weekend, and where no one – as opposed to on the outward journey – controls us anything.