Until recently, the name of Ischgl was associated with that of internationally renowned celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Naomi Campbell or the former American president Bill Clinton, who came down the slopes of this small Austrian ski resort. But for a few days, the reputation of this small Tyrolean village has been associated with a visitor of sad renown: the Covid-19.

Austrian authorities announced the opening on Monday 23 March of an investigation to determine whether a case of contamination by the coronavirus has not been concealed in Ischgl. The accusation is all the more serious since this ski resort is now considered to be one of the main sources of the spread of the pathogen across Europe.

“Our problem is not Iran or Italy, but Ischgl”

Indeed, Germany has managed to trace the path of contamination of 300 people directly to Ischgl. "Our problem is not called Iran, but Ischgl," said the Minister of Health for the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Aalen, one of the cities with the highest number of people who contracted Covid, is located. -19 in Austria A specific mailbox has even been set up by the Aalen health services for all those who have spent holidays in this ski resort or who have come into contact with people who return. About one in five infected people returned from Austria, as did Norway, which contributed to the spread of the virus.

Iceland was the first to sound the alarm. On February 29, 15 vacationers carrying the Covid-19 alighted from a plane to Reykjavik from Munich. All these Icelanders returned from Ischgl. A few days later, on March 5, the Icelandic authorities put the Austrian station on the list of zones at epidemic risk, at the same rank as Iran, Italy and Wuhan, the Chinese city from which the pandemic started.

But in Tyrol, the warning is not heeded and it will take more than a week for the local authorities to decide to blow the whistle on the end of the lucrative winter sports season. However, other countries quickly joined Iceland to try to get the ski resort officials to listen to reason. Norway reported on March 7 that a number of new infected people were from Ischgl. The same day, the small Tyrolean city announced its first case of Covid-19. But local health authorities said in the process that "it was unlikely that this person was infected in Tyrol".

Beer pong and whistles

The facts are however stubborn and two days later, the noose tightens even more around Ischgl and, more precisely, of a very popular bar where skiers used to come to relax after a hard day of schuss … The "Kitzloch" becomes the epicenter of the Tyrolean health crisis. The person who became the first officially confirmed carrier of the Covid-19 at Ischgl worked there . On his own, he is suspected of having contaminated fifteen clients and colleagues, which would make him one of these famous “super-propagators”, capable of spreading the virus to many more people than the average. In fact, a Covid-19 carrier infects about two or three people.

"At first we did not understand how such a large number of cases could be linked to this type of bar," said Jan Pravsgaard Christensen, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Copenhagen, on the American chain CNN. The experts quickly understood, however, that the habits and customs of these places had a lot to do with it: “We noticed that they exchanged their saliva because we often play beer pong in these bars and that the waiters use kinds of whistles to make your way through the crowd, ”says the Danish specialist. Between the ping-pong balls that traveled from mouth to mouth and the servers that passed the whistles, "these places are the perfect accelerators of the spread of viruses", confirms the Tyrolean virologist Robert Zangerle, interviewed by the Austrian daily Der Standard .

When the Tyrol finally decides, on March 12, to decree the end of the ski season, the damage is already done. The ski lift operators are also dragging the closing of the slopes for a few days, deplores the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“Greed has prevailed over the responsibility of looking after the good health of the local population and tourists. We still wanted to make the most of this 'last' week of runways financially ”, denounces Standard, in an editorial that caused a stir in Austria.

Accused on all sides of having contributed to exploding cases of contamination in Europe, the Tyrolean authorities retaliated, arguing that they "had made the right decisions at the right time", notes the German daily Die Welt. They claimed to have sought to avoid the “chaos” and panic that would have resulted from overly brutal decisions.

In the meantime, this “graduated” response has had more profound health consequences than a simple accumulation of cases. For example, an anesthesiologist at the Salzburg hospital, who had spent his vacation in Ischgl, reported to work without knowing that he was carrying the virus. Consequence: a hundred of his colleagues - doctors, surgeons, nurses - had to be placed in administrative segregation, depriving the largest care center in the region of a critical workforce in these times of crisis.

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