Austria is issuing a travel warning for Romania, Bulgaria, and Moldova due to the worsening coronavirus or COVID-19 situation in those nations and clusters in Austria, which involve people connected to the region, the government mentioned on Wednesday.
The move that means the arrivals from those nations must show a negative test or go into two weeks of the quarantine, obeys warnings last week for Serbia and three other non-European counties located in the Western Balkans. Romania and Bulgaria, by contrast, are member states of EU.
Austria Issues Travel Warnings
It also comes as more than 3,000 people in the province of Upper Austria, which borders Germany and the Czech Republic, have been placed in quarantine to contain an outbreak there. At the center of that outbreak is a cluster of 180 cases linked to a church in the city of Linz with many Romanian parishioners.
"Please do not travel to these countries. That is our urgent appeal, as on the one hand it means putting one's health at risk and on the other, we have seen that there are ever more imported cases from these states," Chancellor Sebastian Kurz told a news conference with Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg.
In recent weeks in Austria, roughly 170 cases have been detected that were connected to a foreign country and the bulk were linked to "the Balkans", Kurz said, adding that checks at the borders with Hungary and Slovenia would be doubled. Unusually, Kurz spelled out the quarantine requirements and the penalties for breaching them, adding: "That is unfortunately necessary because we saw in particular recently in Upper Austria that people who had tested positive did not stick to the quarantine requirements and thus put other people in danger."
(With agency inputs)
