SEEN FROM ELSEWHERE – The Valais ski resort has dozens, perhaps hundreds of cases of Covid-19. The bulk of the contamination occurred a week before confinement.
By LENA
By Julien Wicky and Sylvain Besson (La Tribune de Genève)
It was on the evening of Friday March 13 that Philippe Bernard understood the seriousness of the problem. By bringing together its staff, the owner of the Carrefour, a restaurant very frequented at the foot of the slopes of Verbier, notes that one third of its workforce is on sick leave. That is 12 people out of 35. “At that time, there was an awareness,” said the restaurant owner, who had already seen his employees fall ill at the rate of two a day during the past week.
Once synonymous with snow, showers and parties, Verbier is now one of the hot spots of the Coronavirus epidemic in Switzerland. “We are talking about sixty confirmed cases but in fact, there must be 600, 800 or maybe even more, without even counting those who have returned to their countries”, estimates Hicham el-Ghaoui, a doctor from the station that was itself contaminated.
Verbier has also become the symbol of a Switzerland caught up in infection.
