The Czech government ordered bars and clubs to close at 10 p.m. on Thursday and banned Christmas markets to curb one of the world’s highest coronavirus infection rates.
The new restrictions also include a maximum number of visitors of 1,000 people at cultural and sporting events, which will stop at the extensive bans in neighboring Austria and Slovakia, where infection rates are even higher.
The Czechs registered more than 25,000 new cases on Tuesday, a record, and last week an average of 1,516 daily COVID-19 cases per million inhabitants, the third highest in the world after Slovakia and Austria, according to Our World in Data.
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Health Minister Adam Vojtech said daily infections and hospital admissions are likely to continue to increase, but the government hoped the new measures would prevent the need for tighter restrictions.
The pubs and events restrictions are on top of previous restrictions that already exclude people who have not been vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19 from places like pubs, restaurants, cinemas, hairdressers, and gyms.
“Let’s wait 10 days and then we can possibly adjust the measures,” said Vojtech after the government declared a 30-day state of emergency to implement the measures.
Many hospitals have canceled non-urgent treatments to reserve capacity for coronavirus patients, and some, especially in the southeast of the country near the border with Slovakia and Austria, reported that they were overcrowded.
On Thursday, helicopters and a special ambulance bus brought 19 patients from the eastern city of Brno to hospitals in the capital Prague, 200 km away.
Motol University Hospital in Prague accepted 7 of them.
“We now have 110 patients, about half of them are in a serious or semi-serious condition and … two-thirds of them are not vaccinated,” Motol director Miroslav Ludvik told reporters.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who will be handed over to a new government in a few weeks’ time, said the government is in favor of compulsory vaccination for people over 50 or 60, as well as selected professions, which could be approved next week.
However, the new government has spoken out against vaccination mandates.
The Czech Republic has vaccinated 58.5% of the total population, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, which is below the EU average of 65.8%.
Data from the Department of Health showed that 70% of patients in the intensive care unit were unvaccinated. There were nearly 6,000 coronavirus patients in hospitals and around 850 in intensive care, the data showed.
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