Oliver Behrens has started to pay attention to the license plates.

The cars that drive past his Butcherei restaurant are almost all “NF”.

NF for North Frisia.

"That's funny," says Behrens.

"It is very, very quiet on Sylt." It was not yet a complete quarantine, since the tourists flocked to the island, there they ate, drank and danced.

In other federal states, the discos and bars were closed again by this time, but the government in Schleswig-Holstein left them open.

Sarah Obertreis

Editor in business.

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Economically - there is not only agreement on Sylt - that was good.

Pandemic not like that.

On Tuesday, 480 people infected with corona were counted on the island.

617 people from Sylt were in quarantine.

This means that at least every twentieth islander has to isolate himself at the moment.

Behrens says: "Everyone now knows someone here who is infected."

On the phone you come across hoteliers and restaurant operators who have tested positive at home.

They tell it casually and then add, less casually, that they feel “perfectly healthy”.

Your guess: Omikron has arrived on Sylt.

“Once the variant is there, it will penetrate into the last corner anyway,” says one of them.

"The situation is not terribly terrible"

On Sylt, it is currently possible to observe what could happen to many other places in Germany: an explosion in the number of infections, which even the authorities are relatively relaxed about taking note of.

So far the gradients have been mild, you can hear from all sides.

The spokesman for the district of North Friesland says that at no time had the idea of ​​imposing a lockdown on Sylt been considered.

"The situation is not terribly terrible," he explains in a soft voice.

The fact that most of Sylt's hotels and restaurants are still closed is not only due to the annual company holidays in January with few guests.

There are certainly companies that would have opened now if they were still able to work.

The Hotel Stadt Hamburg, for example, had to close temporarily due to corona infections in the workforce, and employees in the Wunderbar and American Bistro also tested positive.

The branch of the Block House steak house chain on Sylt is still open, but here too, employees are isolating themselves "as a precautionary measure".

The Gosch Sylt company has closed at least six of its restaurants on the island, but does not want to provide any information about the reasons.

Dozens became infected in the Red Cliff

However, it is known why the Rotes Kliff discotheque closed weeks ago.

There was an “X-Mas party” here on Christmas Eve with 120 guests - less than 2 G plus, but dozens were infected nonetheless.

The operator suspects that individual celebrants had falsified their vaccination certificates.

Since then, the party has been the first superspreader event of the season, even if the spokesman for the district says the numbers on the island have risen so much that it could not have been due to a single celebration.

Rather, he generally sees all parties at home, in bars and clubs as a “very big focus”.

"Anyone who lets the masses to Sylt must honestly expect the thing to explode afterwards," says Pius Regli.

The Swiss runs the Manne Pahl restaurant and Pius' Weinbar, both of which are currently closed.

Four of Reglis employees tested positive.

All boosted, as he says.

Regli actually took company holidays in late autumn, but now he's hanging on for a few more weeks.

On Sylt they are "killed by guests"

Hardly any restaurateur on Sylt can complain about the economic situation.

Since the end of the first lockdown, they have been "slain by guests", as Regli put it.

But Regli has long wanted stricter measures for unvaccinated people.

When he was one of the first to introduce the 2-G rule in September, he received 1,000 messages from "such individuals," he says.

"The most harmless wished me a quick death."

Unlike many colleagues in the industry, Oliver Behrens was lucky.

At least one of the two restaurants and the beach inn that he runs with his brother are still open.

One employee had celebrated at the "X-Mas Party", another in the hotel of the local DEHOGA board, where several are said to have been infected.

Nevertheless, nobody at Behrens got infected.

He and his brother continue to think every day about whether they should close, out of caution.

"On the other hand, it would be tragic if everything were closed now," says Behrens.