Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein (Greens) announced this at a press conference on Saturday in Wels. The test obligation initially only applies to returnees who arrive via direct flight from Spain, Cyprus or the Netherlands and are not either fully immunized or have a negative PCR test.
No quarantine until the result
If you are not fully vaccinated and cannot present a negative PCR test result, you have to do the test at the airport. There should be free test offers for this. Until the test result is available, the returnee does not have to be in quarantine, it said. At the moment it was not known when the said mandatory test would apply.
Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein (Greens) had repeatedly spoken out in favor of compulsory PCR testing for holiday returnees, because almost a third of corona infections in this group go back. He thinks this is a “sensible option”, Mückstein emphasized on Friday.
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Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) was reluctant to refer to the administrability of such controls. “Last summer, we saw that it is not so easy to check everyone at the border when returning from Croatia,” Kurz pointed out.
The German government declared all of Spain and the Netherlands to be a high-risk area on Friday due to the high number of corona infections in the pandemic. For travelers returning who have not been vaccinated or have recovered from Corona for up to six months, a ten-day quarantine obligation applies. In high-risk areas, a negative test submitted in a neighboring country can only exempt from the quarantine obligation after five days.
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