The apparently imminent lifting of the coronavirus quarantine is ringing the alarm bells in the SPÖ. Health spokesman Philip Kucher spoke in a broadcast today about a dangerous and irresponsible game by the government. A quarantine for infected people could push the healthcare system to its limits again. Vienna’s City Councilor for Health Peter Hacker (SPÖ) spoke to the APA of the Ministry of Health giving up itself.
For hackers, the plans are “clearly wrong”. The World Health Organization (WHO) only explained this week that measures such as driving up the test systems, wearing more masks indoors and “public transport” and contact tracing are necessary. The federal states have a meeting with Health Minister Johannes Rauch (Greens) next week, and he assumes “that these strange ideas will be off the table by then and the minister will put an end to this spook”.
“unworldly”
The city council finds it particularly strange that, according to a draft regulation, people infected with coronavirus should work in joint teams: “Is there a supermarket for infected people then?” said Hacker, who sees this as an unworldly idea. For Kucher, the government has simply given up on pandemic management. The procedure is amateurish, according to the red health spokesman.
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According to Sylvia Gassner, head of the social services department of the vida union, the government is risking contagion of vulnerable groups with the quarantine. Instead of more staff, it is better to send infected people to high-risk patients.
After attacks on the social media platform Twitter, Rauch had defended the idea of easing and got quite angry. As a consequence, he only wants to have his postings about the pandemic distributed by his team in the future, as he announced.