Two years is a long time. In two years you could travel around the world relatively comfortably and without a plane. For the last two years, however, that has been almost impossible. Even in Europe, which likes to boast of its free movement of people and the abolition of border trees, traveling at the beginning of year three of the pandemic is still expensive, complicated and often permeated by an inscrutable web of rules.
For example, anyone who travels to Spain and has been vaccinated twice does not need to show a corona test; for Austria you need a negative PCR test for double vaccination, only triple vaccinations are exempt from this. And if you want to go to Italy, you need at least one negative antigen test in addition to the booster by the end of January. Welcome to united Europe!
For two years, the EU institutions have been trying to implement uniform rules in connection with the fight against the corona pandemic and the freedom of travel of their citizens. And for just as long they fail, which of course is due to none other than the individual states themselves, right at the front: Germany. No other country in Europe has declared all of its European neighbors to be corona high-risk areas. Anyone who wants to enter Germany from a neighboring European country and is not vaccinated must be in quarantine for at least five days, even if they present a negative PCR test. This also affects smaller children who have not yet been vaccinated (no Stiko recommendation), for example from German families who spend their winter holidays in Austria or Italy, for example. This also does not exist in any other EU country.
Travel restrictions are only useful when a wave is just beginning
The EU Commission’s happy announcement that the European Council of Ministers has finally accepted its proposal to facilitate and standardize the free movement of people unfortunately has to be met with great skepticism. In the future, according to the Council’s recommendation, the freedom to travel should no longer be based on the incidence at the place of origin, but only on the EU Covid certificate, according to which one has proven to have recovered, been vaccinated or tested. The deadline was February 1, but the word recommendation already indicates that every state can do what it wants again. And so it happens, with the result that traveling in the EU becomes even more complicated.
The experience of the past two years shows very clearly that travel restrictions or even bans only make a meaningful contribution to containing the pandemic if a wave of infection with a new variant is at the very beginning and tests and tracking of infection chains are guaranteed. Both are no longer the case.
Since Omikron has been spreading rapidly and widely throughout Europe for weeks, such measures no longer make sense. Why should a holiday in a holiday apartment or in a hotel in Austria with 2-G proof be more risky than sending your children to school or kindergarten in Munich (weekly incidence: 1700)? Quarantine is ordered for one, a test is sufficient for the other. Children under the age of twelve are once again put at a disadvantage by the quarantine regulations in Germany. Almost all EU countries exempt them from the test rules, as required by the draft that has now been adopted by the EU Commission.
The German reduction of the validity of the convalescent certificate to three months must also be increased again to six months, in line with the EU recommendation.
To ensure that the Commission draft does not remain a paper tiger, the governments, especially the German government, must finally implement their own recommendation, which they have approved at EU level. A European Union with border controls, different testing and quarantine regulations must finally be a thing of the past.