By John Miller
ZUOZ, Switzerland (Reuters) – Residents of Zuoz, a Swiss mountain village, lined up on Friday for COVID-19 swabs, part of a new mass-testing programme the government hopes will identify asymptomatic carriers of a hefty second wave of infections.
By day’s end, 4,249 people had been tested there and at other locations in the canton of Grisons, with 38 who tested positive sent into temporary isolation.
The canton – home to ski resorts including St. Moritz and Davos that are up and running while the country records around 5,000 COVID infections and 100 deaths daily – bought 30,000 rapid tests. So far 11,000 locals have signed up for a programme that ends on Sunday.
Grisons follows Slovakia and Italy’s South Tyrolia region in November, and Austria this month, in doing population-wide coronavirus screening.
The tourism-reliant region anticipates the scheme will help capture a sharper image of the current infection rate, preparing for even broader screening in the future.
It also hopes to skirt stricter lockdowns in place elsewhere in Europe.
“We have to improve test strategies, to get away from lockdown or part-lockdown measures,” said Martin Buehler, Grisons’s civil protection head and mass-test organizer.
While the government on Friday expanded evening and weekend curfews, Swiss COVID-19 restrictions still fall well short of much of Europe, as the country has placed a premium on balancing health considerations with protecting its economy.
In Zuoz, Annalea Stuppan, with a 90-year-old grandmother she is anxious to protect from COVID-19, was tested once already this year but signed up again for Friday’s mass test.
“It’s just our responsibility, to show what the picture is at the moment in the valley,” she told Reuters.
Mass testing is not without its critics, however.
Severin Schwan, chief executive of Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Roche – which makes tens of millions of COVID-19 tests monthly – wants testing to be prioritised for risk groups and medical workers, not for rooting out symptom-free infections, saying there are not enough tests to go around.
Grisons civil protection head Buehler said he had no trouble getting the 30,000 tests from U.S. diagnostics company Abbott Laboratories.
“It didn’t take 10 minutes, and we had the offer on the table,” he said.
Switzerland’s ski lifts have been running for weeks, in contrast to France, Germany, Italy and Austria where they have been idled.
Skier Claudio Duschletta, a local just off the slopes at St. Moritz’s Celerina ski area on Friday, told Reuters through a mask – required to ride the lifts – that “conditions were amazing”.
A thermal baths director, he hopes the mass tests help mitigate damage to local businesses for the Christmas season, where many foreign guests are already expected to stay away.
“If they manage to catch a couple of hundred that are positive and take them out of circulation, it’s probably a good thing,” he said. “We still have another 10, 12 days until the season really kicks in.”
(Reporting by John Miller; editing by John Stonestreet)
