Austrian authorities made ‘momentous miscalculations’ by delaying and then rushing to evacuate the ski resort of Ischgl where it is believed hundreds of people, including at least 180 Britons, contracted coronavirus in early March.
An independent commission headed by the former vice-president of the Austrian supreme court said that authorities should have shut down apres-ski bars, restaurants, ski lifts and non-essential bus services as early as 9 March, the day after health authorities were told that a waiter from one of the bars had tested positive for Covid-19.
Instead, they didn’t order a shut down until 10 March and they didn’t put a stop to skiing until 12 March. The commission’s chair Roland Rohrer said this was ‘a wrong decision, from an epidemiological perspective’.
Rohrer said the Tirol’s health authorities had acted ‘untruthfully, and therefore badly’, when they announced on 5 March that a group of Icelandic skiers who had tested positive in Reykjavik had probably caught the virus on the plane home and not in Ischgl.
The state prosecutor in Innsbruck is investigating four main suspects for negligence, including Ischgl’s mayor, for ‘deliberate or negligent endangerment of people through transferrable diseases’.
However, the commission said it had found no evidence to back up claims that authorities had been lobbied by the local tourism industry to keep the ski lifts running for as long as possible.
But when the decision was eventually made to evacuate the entire Paznaun valley, the report said it was done in a rush, leading to skiers being crammed onto buses, which likely exacerbated the spread of the virus amongst tourists.
The expert commission’s report is one of several investigations into the chronology of the Ischgl cluster.
