Austria tightened the controls for holiday returnees and travelers. There are ten-hour traffic jams at the border, and the Red Cross provides those waiting with drinks all night. Carinthia’s governor criticizes unreasonable conditions – and suspends the new regulation again.
A new Corona regulation led to traffic chaos on the border between Austria and Slovenia over the weekend. Drivers – including many German tourists on their way back from their vacation in Croatia – were stuck in traffic for up to twelve hours, as the Austrian police reported. In the end, the provincial governor of Carinthia, Peter Kaiser, unceremoniously suspended the regulation from Vienna. “It cannot be that the risk from the controls is greater than from the virus,” said the SPÖ politician in support of the statement.
The rigorous implementation of the regulation leads to unacceptable conditions at the border, and the hygiene situation alone is unsustainable, Kaiser told the Austrian news agency APA. Because of the increasing number of corona cases in the Balkans, the Austrian government had ordered that travelers at the border had to sign a declaration that they would cross Austria without stopping and leave the country again. In turn, travelers had to fill out a long form with lots of personal data.
As a result, according to APA, there were more than ten hours of waiting time at the Karawanken tunnel, while entering via the Loiblpass it was seven hours. At the Carinthian police, the phone no longer stood still, desperate vacationers asked what was going on. The Red Cross was on duty all night to provide the people with drinks. Police in Slovenia had to take a child to hospital with heat stroke.
On Saturday and on Sunday night, mainly German and Dutch holidaymakers were on their way home. They were completely taken by surprise by the new regulations, as the regulation had only gone to the district authorities on Saturday morning. Slovenia and Croatia were also surprised. Only on Sunday afternoon did the situation return to normal.
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