| schema:articleBody
| - As anger builds in Austria over coronavirus clusters emerging in ski resorts, local officials said Wednesday that foreigners had been using loopholes to sneak in to the country for ski holidays and parties. Helmut Mall, mayor of the resort of St Anton in the western Tyrol region, said he knew of parties where foreigners "have been drinking -- this is often reported by neighbours and the police have had to intervene". Mall told AFP that as many as 200 foreigners, most of them from Britain and from Scandinavian countries, had managed to get into the resort to ski. Some of them had also been holding parties in barns and private accommodation, he said. "We are tightening the restrictions, but for the ones who are already here, there is not so much we can do," Maximilian Brandhuber, a spokesman for Tyrol's regional government, said of foreign visitors. Despite last year's outbreaks in Ischgl and St Anton, two popular ski resorts where more than 6,000 tourists from 45 countries claim to have contracted the coronavirus last March, Austria's ski lifts reopened around Christmas for domestic visitors. The decision was controversial as schools, and large swathes of the economy are still shut and some of Austria's neighbours have taken a tougher line on skiing. The Austrian government, however, said that skiing is safe as it's an outdoor sport. Despite strict entry requirements mandated by the government in Vienna, Mall said local authorities had seen an unusual uptick in residency registrations by foreigners claiming to be looking for work in restaurants or hotels, even though both sectors are closed. Mall says the loophole allows the foreign visitors to legally rent rooms or apartments and that there had been as many as 20 registrations per day in a village of some 2,600 inhabitants. "We're under lockdown, Austria is under lockdown, the entire world is under lockdown, and yet on the streets here you see unfamiliar faces, groups of people," Mall said. "Each day there are more, and you wonder: What are they all doing here?" he added. Though hit hard by the first outbreak last spring, the small, upscale resort of St Anton currently has zero cases of coronavirus. Mall says he fears the visitors could introduce new variants. In other ski resorts clusters have already emerged. At least 76 Covid-19 infections have been traced back to a ski instructor course in the Salzburg region, while 16 infected ski lift employees in Zillertal allegedly spread the virus to an elderly care home. deh/jsk/spm
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)