Diego Mangold is ambivalent. Because he is actually happy that in addition to keys, wallet and mobile phone, he no longer has to think about the mask when he leaves the apartment. Mainly because it would only be compulsory in public transport and supermarkets anyway. “But this break is probably not particularly clever. The pandemic still exists. And it can easily happen that everything repeats itself in autumn,” says the student from Vienna, who was out and about in downtown Linz yesterday. Still with a mask in the red-brown shoulder bag.
“We won’t be spared”
From June 1st this will no longer be necessary. Then the mask requirement only applies in hospitals and homes. Health Minister Johannes Rauch (Greens) and Constitutional Minister Karoline Edtstadler (VP) announced on Tuesday that the mask requirement would “pause for the time being”. For the time being for three months. “We probably won’t be spared. But I have to be honest, I felt a lot of sympathy for the people in retail. Wear the mask all day. A break like this over the summer is the right thing,” says Gertraud Wartner, who used yesterday’s Monday to run errands on Linz’s main square.
Video: What do Upper Austrians think about the temporary end of the mask requirement? OÖN-TV asked around in Linz.
Ernst Schimbeck from Wels was also on the road there, actually a clear supporter of the mask requirement. “But of course it’s nicer for me without a mask. That’s why it’s a good story that the obligation is temporarily suspended. I’m just afraid that we’ll see each other again in the fall,” he says.
“What now, no more masks? Finally. That was really annoying,” says the young car technician Din Mulalic, visibly pleased with the news he’s hearing. “If I’m in Plus City all day, for example, I don’t need a mask anywhere. And then I go to the supermarket there to buy a drink and I need it there. That was quite tedious and incomprehensible “, he says. But he is certain: “The mask requirement will come back in the fall anyway. It’s only a matter of time.”
That’s how experts see it too. Bernd Lamprecht, corona expert and head of the clinic for pulmonary medicine in the Kepler University Hospital, speaks in the OÖN interview about a “carefree summer” and predicts a “difficult autumn”. Read here:
More air for commuters
Commuters will also be able to breathe again from June 1st. Like Manuel Engleder, who drives publicly every day from St. Georgen im Attergau to Linz. “I sit on public transport for three hours every day to get to my job in the morning and home in the evening. I have to wear a mask all the time,” he says. The risk of infection has not yet been banned, but the 29-year-old educator sees the end of the mask requirement as at least a “relief”. Linz AG, on whose buses and trains the mask requirement is also to fall on June 1, wants to wait for the specific regulation: “If there are different regulations in the state, these must also be taken into account,” it says.
The mask requirement on public transport became effective on April 14, 2020. More than two years later, she is now at least being sent on a summer break.
You can read more voices from Upper Austria in this article:
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Source: Nachrichten
