Austria is getting a third lockdown

Since yesterday evening it is official: we will once again enter a full lockdown. This third one will take place from 2020-12-26 until (incl.) 2021-01-17. On the weekend before 2021-01-18 people will have the chance to test themselves out of the lockdown. For those who don’t the lockdown will take a week longer.

Schools will also stay closed until the 18th but there will be distance learning starting on 2021-01-07.

In theory, restaurants and shops will also open again on Jan 18 to those who can present a COVID-19 test. In practice it isn’t clear who will do the checks. There is only so much the police can do. Everything else will somehow have to be handled by the shops, restaurants, and institutions themselves. No idea how, but I’m definitely curious to learn more that.

And it wouldn’t be Austria if we hadn’t some special rules for skiing with mandatory FFP2 masks on the lifts. For some reason there exists no such requirement for any other transportation system…

For us, besides the distance learning, there won’t change all that much. We’ve been in home-office since March and we didn’t plan to go back to the office in the near future anyway. It’s still disappointing that we were not able to get our numbers down again and that such a lockdown was necessary.

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