On the website of the party event “Austria goes Zrce” the festival in the coming year is already being advertised: “Look forward to 7 days of summer, sun, beach and the hottest acts on the beautiful Zrce Beach in Croatia.” But for the time being Austria has a souvenir a few hundred participants in this year's festival to do a veritable corona cluster.

More than 300 returnees from the event on the Croatian island of Pag have already been reported as infected, and the authorities are expecting further infections to be unreported.

All Austrian federal states have called on those returning to the festival to have PCR tests carried out immediately in order to prevent further spread.

Stephan Löwenstein

Political correspondent based in Vienna.

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The music and dance event on the Adriatic island lasted from July 17th to 24th, which advertises that during the summer season there will be celebrations day and night on the Zrce beach.

According to various information from the local tourist office, the organizers and the Austrian media, between 2500 and 8000 Austrians took part, the latter number being rejected by the organizer as completely unrealistic.

An organized graduation trip was organized parallel to the festival.

The organizers of these days, which are aimed at the young Austrian audience, stated that they complied with the basic Covid rules for the clubs and discotheques that have now reopened, according to which participants must either be vaccinated, tested negative or recovered from Covid disease ("Drei-G -Rule").

Not strictly controlled

In the Austrian media, participants were quoted as saying that this had not been consistently checked at all entrances. The organizer contradicted this. After infections occurred during the high school graduation trip despite continuous PCR testing, the festival decided on double controls, which were carried out rigorously, the newspaper Der Standard quoted the managing director of the event as saying. However, many of the infected were fully vaccinated - from Lower Austria, for example, 13 out of 38. This raises the question of how useful the "three G rule" is at major events.

The organizer of the Frequency Festival, a similar event that has been canceled in Austria, criticized the authorities for this. They had a concept of discovering most of the infected people on arrival, and on the other hand, festivals could encourage more young people to get vaccinated. A survey on the Frequency Festival showed that 75 percent of all visitors would have been willing to be vaccinated for the festival, wrote Barracuda Music managing director Ewald Tatar on Facebook.

Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein (Greens) said on Friday: “I have absolutely nothing against parties, and the boys deserve it after 16 months of the pandemic. I think that is also very important, but under maximum safety conditions, tested or, even better, double vaccinated. ”When asked whether festivals could not have taken place in Austria this summer under strict precautions, the minister referred to the responsibility of the regional authorities to assess the concepts of events with more than 500 participants according to the requirements of the federal government and to decide accordingly. The chief health officer Katharina Reich found on ORF radio that the cancellation of the Frequency Festival was "naturally clever", as the risk of such major events was known. Be it another matterthat young people avoid events abroad.