Starting with that night, nobody is allowed to go out on the streets for the next seven days between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. The only exceptions are emergencies and night workers. Music is also no longer allowed to be played in all bars.
As the Greek civil defense announced, more than ten percent of the tests were positive in rapid test controls in the past few days. The quarantine shelters are already overcrowded, said the chief of the island’s health service, Dina Sampsouni. Greek media reported that there had been a “hail of canceled bookings” following the announcement of the local lockdown.
Popular travel destination
Mykonos is known as a popular travel destination for predominantly wealthy people from countries in the Eastern Mediterranean. In addition, top football players, actresses and other celebrities spend their holidays on the small Cycladic island. Most recently, there were parties with hundreds of guests almost every day, where people celebrated all night long without a distance and without a mask.
The government in Athens announced last week that it would not endanger the country’s tourism under any circumstances because some irresponsible entrepreneurs and guests were disregarding all protective rules.
Curfew also in Catalonia
Other vacation regions are also acutely struggling with increasing numbers of infections. The Spanish CoV hotspot Catalonia also introduced a night-time ban. The Catalan Higher Regional Court approved a corresponding application from the regional government in Barcelona on Friday. The measure is already in force in Barcelona and 160 other municipalities with a particularly bad situation and should initially apply for one week, the authorities said.
Around six million of the more than 7.5 million residents of the popular holiday region in northeast Spain on the border with France are now only allowed to take to the streets between 1:00 and 6:00 a.m. with good reason. This also applies to tourists who are housed in the affected communities. The curfew only applies to cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants and high numbers of infections.
“Sudden decline” in bookings
In view of the high CoV numbers in Spain, the tourism industry was pessimistic about the current summer season. There is a “sudden decrease” in bookings by foreign holidaymakers, reported the state TV broadcaster RTVE on Saturday, citing the vice-president of the Spanish tourism association Exceltur, Jose Luis Zoreda.
“If the Corona numbers continue to worsen, we estimate that tourism will generate sales of 37.97 billion euros in this summer quarter, more than the 24.30 billion in the same period last year, but much less than the 58, 37 billion in 2019, “the station quoted the tourism manager as saying.
The industry had hoped for a much stronger recovery in business this summer because of the ongoing vaccination campaign. In normal times, tourism contributes more than twelve percent to the Spanish gross domestic product (GDP), on the popular holiday islands of the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands it is even around 35 percent. The industry secures hundreds of thousands of jobs.
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