Austria will go into a second lockdown as of next week in an attempt to suppress a new resurgence of Covid-19 in the country.
The new restrictions, which will include a daily curfew from 20:00 till 06:00, come into effect on 3 November and will last through the end of the month.
Educational institutions like high schools and universities will close and switch students to online learning, although kindergartens and primary schools will remain open. Shops, too, will remain open, but social venues like restaurants, cafes will close, operating only on a takeaway basis. Hotels will also close to all but exceptional guest, including business travelers, while gyms, cinemas, theaters and museums will shut.
People will be permitted to leave their homes outside the curfew hours.
The new measures come as the number of new infections in the country rose to more than 5,000 per day for the third straight day on 31 October, a level the government says will stretch hospitals beyond capacity. At the beginning of October, the rate of new infections per day was just over 1,000, up from an average of around 300 in early September.
This is the second lockdown that the Austrian government will have imposed. The first was introduced on 11 March in response to the first wave of infections. It subsequently became one of the first European countries to ease restrictions in mid-April after daily case number dropped to below 100 from a just shy of 1,000 in late March.
Passenger car traffic fell by as much as 72pc by the end of March, versus pre-Covid-19 levels. Austria's power demand also fell in April compared to a year earlier, in part due to Covid-19.
Austria is just the latest European country to announce severe new restrictions in response to a second wave of Covid-19 infections across the continent.
England announced yesterday that it will go into a second national lockdown on 5 November, days after France actually began its own one-month lockdown on 30 October. Germany will begin a new nationwide lockdown from tomorrow, while Portugal will introduce partial lockdown measures from 4 November in 121 municipalities, including the capital city Lisbon and Porto.
Such measures in some of Europe's top oil consumers will add to an already bleak demand outlook for the refining sector in the region
