SOURCE: As­so­ci­at­ed Press

BERLIN (AP) — The Aus­tri­an gov­ern­ment or­dered a na­tion­wide lock­down for un­vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple start­ing mid­night Sun­day to slow the fast spread of the coro­n­avirus in the coun­try.

The move pro­hibits un­vac­ci­nat­ed in­di­vid­u­als old­er than age 12 from leav­ing their homes ex­cept for ba­sic ac­tiv­i­ties such as work­ing, gro­cery shop­ping, go­ing for a walk — or get­ting vac­ci­nat­ed.

Au­thor­i­ties are con­cerned that hos­pi­tal staff will no longer be able to han­dle the grow­ing in­flux of COVID-19 pa­tients.

“It’s our job as the gov­ern­ment of Aus­tria to pro­tect the peo­ple,” Chan­cel­lor Alexan­der Schal­len­berg told re­porters in Vi­en­na on Sun­day. “There­fore we de­cid­ed that start­ing Mon­day ... there will be a lock­down for the un­vac­ci­nat­ed.”

The lock­down af­fects about 2 mil­lion peo­ple in the Alpine coun­try of 8.9 mil­lion peo­ple, news agency APA re­port­ed. It doesn’t ap­ply to chil­dren un­der the age of 12 be­cause they can­not yet of­fi­cial­ly get vac­ci­nat­ed.

The lock­down will ini­tial­ly last for 10 days and po­lice have been asked to check peo­ple out­side to make sure they are vac­ci­nat­ed, Schal­len­berg said.

Aus­tria has one of the low­est vac­ci­na­tion rates in west­ern Eu­rope: on­ly around 65% of the to­tal pop­u­la­tion is ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed. In re­cent weeks, the coun­try has faced a wor­ry­ing trend in in­fec­tions. The coun­try re­port­ed 11,552 new cas­es on Sun­day; a week ago there were 8,554 new in­fec­tions.

The sev­en-day in­fec­tion rate stands at 775.5 new cas­es per 100,000 in­hab­i­tants. In com­par­i­son, the rate is at 289 in neigh­bour­ing Ger­many, which has al­ready al­so sound­ed the alarm over the ris­ing num­bers.