Austria’s Vaccine Mandate Is Becoming Law

Austria is the first Western democracy to mandate Covid vaccinations for nearly its entire adult population, a once-unthinkable move that is being seen as a test case for other countries grappling with pockets of vaccine resistance.

The sweeping measure, which easily cleared its final parliamentary hurdle on Thursday when it was approved by lawmakers in Austria’s upper house, will be signed into law as soon as Friday by President Alexander Van der Bellen of Austria.

The requirement will be introduced in phases.

First, the government plans to send a letter to all Austrians in the next few weeks, notifying them of the new rules and giving them a month to comply. Exemptions will be available only to pregnant women, people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons and people who have recently recovered from Covid-19. In this first phase, no fines will be imposed for failure to comply.

That changes in mid-March, when the police are to start conducting random checks of vaccination status — including during traffic stops. People who cannot produce proof of vaccination can be fined up to 600 euros (about $675). Those who contest their fines could eventually see them increased to €3,600 (about $4,100).

In a third phase, for which no starting date has yet been set, the government would create a formal vaccination registry of all residents, and automatically assess fines for noncompliance. If the pandemic recedes enough, though, this phase might never be put into effect, officials say.

Polls suggest that many Austrians support the mandate, but the issue has also galvanized a noisy protest movement there. Tens of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets across the country in recent months to oppose pandemic restrictions, chief among them the vaccine mandate, which was first proposed in November. At the time, cases were surging in the country, driven mostly by unvaccinated people, and Austria introduced a lockdown that applied only to the unvaccinated.

About 76 percent of people in Austria are now fully vaccinated. Even so, a new surge that began in late December has sent new cases soaring to record levels; the daily average has nearly doubled in the past two weeks.

Making vaccines mandatory rather than voluntary has been a threshold that European democracies have long seemed unwilling to cross. Leaders have stressed respect for civil liberties and drawn contrasts with the policies of more authoritarian governments.

But as the pandemic stretches into a third year with vaccination rates plateauing in a number of countries, some leaders have changed their minds.

“The path to freedom is the vaccine mandate,” Chancellor Karl Nehammer of Austria said when the law was debated in Parliament last month.

Last year, when he was interior minister, Mr. Nehammer noted the difficulty governments faced in persuading skeptical people to get inoculated voluntarily.

“It is not a question of ideology, it is a question of convincing,” he said. “We can’t do and try enough to convince so that the unvaccinated get vaccinated.”

Other countries are watching Austria’s move to a near-universal mandate closely.

In neighboring Germany, where about one in three people are not considered to be fully vaccinated, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced plans for a general vaccine mandate, and the country is slated to introduce one next month for health care workers and residents of nursing homes and care facilities. Italy now requires nearly everyone over 50 to be vaccinated; Greece has a similar rule for residents over 60.

An exodus of senior officials from 10 Downing Street on Thursday deepened the crisis engulfing Prime Minister Boris Johnson, as he fought to hold on to power in the wake of a scandal over get-togethers that breached lockdown restrictions.

Mr. Johnson’s chief of staff, private secretary, communications chief, and head of policy all resigned, leaving the top of British government rudderless at a time when Mr. Johnson is struggling to avert a mutiny in the ranks of his Conservative Party. About a dozen party lawmakers have called publicly for a no-confidence vote in the prime minister.

The departure of one of his longest-serving and most influential aides, Munira Mirza, his policy chief, carried a particular sting. Some of the resignations fulfilled Mr. Johnson’s promise to overhaul the Downing Street operation, after the release of a government report on Monday that criticized the office for “excessive” workplace drinking, citing 16 social gatherings — some of them now under police investigation — during periods when England was under strict lockdowns.

The departures of the chief of staff, Dan Rosenfeld, and the principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, were not as unexpected as Ms. Mirza’s. Critics have faulted Mr. Rosenfeld for his management of Downing Street, while Mr. Reynolds sent an email inviting nearly 100 staff members to a B.Y.O.B. garden party at a time when the government’s own lockdown rules prohibited people from gathering with more than one person outside their families.

The departure of the communications director, Jack Doyle, was also less of a surprise, as his name was linked with some of the parties now under investigation by the police.

Mr. Johnson could be forced out of power if 54 Conservative lawmakers submit letters calling for a no-confidence vote, and then in that vote, a majority of Tory lawmakers in Parliament cast a ballot against him.

On Wednesday, three more Conservative lawmakers openly called on the prime minister to step down, bringing the total who have gone public to a dozen.

World leaders are increasingly deciding that their countries need to figure out how to live with the virus rather than minimize the number of cases.

Britain, France, Denmark and other parts of Europe have loosened restrictions. Australia has dropped mask mandates and reopened its border. South Africa has lifted curfews and required schools to open fully.

China is doing none of this.

As the Beijing Olympics begin, China continues to pursue a “zero Covid” policy. The Olympics will have few fans. As it has for almost two years, China responds to new outbreaks by imposing strict lockdowns. In the northwestern city of Lanzhou last year, officials told roughly four million people to stay home in response to fewer than 50 known cases.

China’s strategy has had both major successes (holding deaths to low levels) and major costs (disrupting daily life even more than in other countries). It makes for a fascinating case study at a time when Americans disagree vehemently — and often along partisan lines — about whether to maintain Covid precautions or return to normal.

China’s strategy would not be possible in a country that emphasizes individual rights as much as the U.S. does. But China’s strategy does show what a society can do when it makes the prevention of Covid its No. 1 priority, almost regardless of the side effects.

A question that experts are asking now is whether China’s strategy is sustainable, given the contagiousness of Omicron. For now, China’s leaders are sticking with it.

A record-setting spike in coronavirus cases wasn’t enough to derail the job market recovery at the beginning of the year.

U.S. employers added 467,000 jobs in January, the Labor Department said on Friday. That showed the resilience of the recovery in the face of a resurgent pandemic. The January data was collected in the first weeks of the year, when coronavirus cases topped 800,000 a day and millions of workers were kept home by positive tests, suspected exposures or child care disruptions. That led many economists — and even the White House — to set expectations for a weak report.

Instead, employers continued to add jobs at nearly the rate they did in December, when payrolls grew by more than half a million. That number was revised up from earlier estimates.

“Clearly something is different about this surge,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist for the career site ZipRecruiter. Job seekers remain optimistic, she said, and companies that have been struggling to recruit workers aren’t pulling back on hiring just because cases shot up for a few weeks. The Labor Department counted 10.9 million job openings at the end of December — just a touch off recent record levels.

“Employers who have been engaged in this dogfight for talent, they’re not standing down,” she said. “They are sticking around because they think the surge will be over soon.”

Omicron’s fingerprints were evident elsewhere in the report. The unemployment rate rose slightly to 4 percent, and the labor force shrank, suggesting the pandemic kept at least some people from looking for work. And more than 3.6 million people reported being absent from work because of illness in January, more than at any prior point in the pandemic.

Economists also cautioned that measurement issues and other quirks made the data difficult to interpret. Indeed, two key measures in the report pointed in different directions last month: Payroll jobs rose, but an alternative measure of employment, based on a survey of households, actually fell by more than a quarter-million.

Government statisticians try to adjust the monthly figures to account for predictable seasonal trends, such as retail layoffs after the holidays, but the pandemic has disrupted many of those patterns. The Labor Department also incorporates data revisions and methodological updates every January.

Still, economists said that employers’ willingness to keep hiring was a good sign for the economy. If activity could persist during the wave, then when it passes, both consumer spending on in-person services and overall growth should continue to improve “at an accelerated pace, at least for the bulk of this year,” said David Berson, the chief economist at Nationwide Insurance. “After that, the crystal ball gets very hazy.”

An estimated 2.4 million Americans have hepatitis C, and in 2019 more than 14,000 people in the United States died from it despite the availability of drugs offering a relatively straightforward cure.

The U.S. government set a target of largely vanquishing the disease by 2030, yet data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show it is struggling to meet it.

The pandemic has aggravated the challenge — three-quarters of surveyed state viral hepatitis programs reported losing staff members and cutting preventive services. But it has also ushered in a wave of diagnostics that could help the fight.

Experts say the country needs to make it easier for those diagnosed to begin treatment the same day. And automated molecular tests capable of use at the point of care, similar to ones used for diagnosing Covid, could be crucial for doing so.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration who sits on the board of Pfizer, recently described the advent of these diagnostics as “one of the most enduring technological innovations” stemming from the pandemic. Such hepatitis C tests are already in use abroad, but no device makers have submitted one to the F.D.A. for approval.

For many patients, navigating a complex pathway to treatment, entailing multiple return visits over a period of weeks or months, can prove insurmountable. “It’s just a big barrier,” said Dr. Lucinda Grande, a physician.

Automated molecular tests could compress this process. From a small sample of blood or saliva, the tests amplify any trace of viral genetic material in a process akin to the older laboratory-based method of polymerase chain reaction (or P.C.R.), but have been miniaturized to run on small machines. The technologies have been around for years but gained greater visibility during the pandemic, when the F.D.A. allowed many test developers to leapfrog what is traditionally a lengthy approval process.

Companies that have developed coronavirus tests of this ilk have seen enormous growth, and a similar molecular test for hepatitis C could allow clinicians to deliver a diagnosis immediately and perhaps start many patients on medications the same day. Patients may then be less likely to transmit the disease to others, and more likely to complete treatment and be cured.

— Ted Alcorn

A new report from the World Health Organization has highlighted the overabundance of medical waste around the world caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The thousands of tons of extra garbage — discarded syringes, old test kits and used vaccine vials — has strained waste management systems and is threatening both human health and the environment, the W.H.O. said this week.

The agency, which is part of the United Nations, said that most of the estimated 87,000 tons of personal protective equipment and supplies for coronavirus testing and vaccinations — distributed to countries from March 2020 to November 2021 through a U.N. emergency initiative — has ended up as waste.

In addition, more than 8 billion coronavirus vaccine doses given globally have produced 143 tons of trash in the form of syringes, needles and safety boxes. Some of the waste could expose other people to needle punctures and disease-causing germs, the report said.

“It is absolutely vital to provide health workers with the right P.P.E.,” Dr. Michael Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, said in a statement. “But it is also vital to ensure that it can be used safely without impacting on the surrounding environment.”

To combat these problems, the report recommends the use of “eco-friendly” packaging and shipping, along with reusable equipment and products made from recyclable or biodegradable materials.

The report also noted that 30 percent of health care facilities worldwide could not handle the amount of garbage they were creating even before the pandemic. And that number grows to as much as 60 percent in the least developed countries. The trash can contaminate the air in nearby communities when it is burned, pollute water and attract disease-carrying pests, the report’s authors wrote. They called for increased investment in cleaner waste-treatment technologies and recycling.

Solid waste experts have said that high volumes of personal protective equipment have been misclassified as hazardous. Much of that material is dumped in burn pits because it is excluded from normal trash.

“The report is a reminder that although the pandemic is the most severe health crisis in a century, it is connected with many other challenges that countries face,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. director general.

The estimate does not include the trash from hundreds of tons of supplies that were not distributed through the U.N., or face coverings and at-home testing kits used by the general public.

Food prices have skyrocketed globally because of disruptions in the global supply chain, adverse weather and rising energy prices, increases that are imposing a heavy burden on poorer people around the world and threatening to stoke social unrest.

The increases have affected items as varied as grains, vegetable oils, butter, pasta, beef and coffee. They come as farmers around the globe face an array of challenges, including drought and ice storms that have ruined crops, rising prices for fertilizer and fuel, and pandemic-related labor shortages and supply chain disruptions that make it difficult to get products to market.

A global index released on Thursday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed food prices in January climbed to their highest level since 2011, when skyrocketing costs contributed to political uprisings in Egypt and Libya. The price of meat, dairy and cereals trended upward from December, while the price of oils reached the highest level since the index’s tracking began in 1990.

Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who was formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said that food price increases would strain incomes in poorer countries, especially in some parts of Latin America and Africa, where some people may spend up to 50 or 60 percent of their income on food.

He said that it wasn’t “much of an exaggeration” to say the world was approaching a global food crisis, and that slower growth, high unemployment and stressed budgets from governments that have spent heavily to combat the pandemic had created “a perfect storm of adverse circumstances.”

“There’s a lot of cause for worry about social unrest on a widespread scale,” he added.

The Chinese authorities said on Friday that they had detected more than 300 Covid-19 cases in people seeking to enter, or remain in, the tightly controlled bubble that Beijing is betting will allow it to hold the Olympic Games safely during a pandemic.

About two-thirds of the 308 positive tests since Jan. 23 occurred when people arrived at Beijing Capital International Airport, the only gateway into the country for the Games. The remaining 102 cases were discovered during the daily tests that are compulsory for people who are in a closed-loop system that has walled off Olympic participants from Chinese society.

The authorities said they had administered more than 71,000 tests — at official hotels, venues, the Olympic Village, the media compound and other sites — on Thursday alone and discovered 21 cases. Health officials said they expected those figures to decline as the Games proceed and fewer people arrive in Beijing.

The pandemic’s reach is a particularly contentious subject in China, where the government has pursued an uncompromising zero-Covid policy. Under the system that the authorities designed for the Games, Olympic participants are not allowed to have contact with anyone outside the bubble, with their flights even parking at a sealed-off airport terminal staffed with workers in full-body protective gear.

Olympic participants may not use transportation other than official vehicles and buses. Restaurants and sightseeing are forbidden. And housing is available only in heavily guarded, access-controlled complexes.

So far, 111 athletes and team officials have tested positive for the virus after arriving in China. That figure, though, understates the pathogen’s toll on the Games, because some people, like the Austrian ski jumper Marita Kramer, contracted the virus shortly before their planned travel to Beijing and withdrew from their events.

Positive tests had already compromised some competitions before Friday night’s opening ceremony.

When the Ukrainian figure skater Ivan Shmuratko tested positive for the virus, that sidelined him from the men’s component of the team event on Friday and prevented his team from accumulating any points in his portion of the event. The Ukrainian Olympic Committee said it hoped that Shmuratko, who was set to make his Olympic debut, could recover in time for the start of the men’s individual competition on Tuesday.

Germany’s hopes in the same competition were jeopardized after the pairs skater Nolan Seegert tested positive. Minerva Fabienne Hase, his skating partner, has so far tested negative, but there were no alternates for the pair. Rather than withdraw, Germany chose to move ahead in the team event, knowing that it would not earn any points in the pairs component, which had dashed the country’s hopes for a medal.

Service industries were hit hard in January as the latest coronavirus surge led to absences among employees, kept customers away and compounded supply constraints. Perhaps no sector was struck harder than the restaurant and bar industry.

Robert LeBlanc, a restaurateur in New Orleans, had six locations heading into the pandemic — a mix of local restaurants and neighborhood bars, as well as a small hotel — “all of which were profitable, soundly profitable,” Mr. LeBlanc said. But the economic ravages of Covid-19 forced him to shut half of his businesses — even before the latest wave.

“Half our man-hours were lost because of Omicron,” he said. “We had to close down each one of our restaurants for at least two days — some of them for four or five days — because we had so many people who had it at once, and now subsequently pretty much everybody on our team has gotten it and had to quarantine and take time off.”

Sales have sunk to levels not seen since the darkest days of 2020.

This “last blow of Omicron” felt like “the worst one yet,” Mr. LeBlanc said. Not only did it seem as though lunch and dinner crowds thinned out, but the government aid that helped get the business through past surges was no longer available.

The pandemic relief package that President Biden signed into law in March included $28.6 billion for a Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which through the Small Business Administration gave grants to restaurants and other food businesses.

That fund was closed in October after being depleted, having fulfilled fewer than a third of the grant requests it had received.

The Independent Restaurant Coalition, a trade group, estimates that 42 percent of businesses that did not receive the grants are in danger of filing for bankruptcy protection or have done so, compared with just 20 percent that received the grants. The coalition has organized a “phone-your-member-of-Congress campaign” to press legislators to replenish the fund.

So far, those calls have been drowned out by debate over other priorities.

Mr. LeBlanc prays that a continued decline in coronavirus cases, paired with the coming of warmer weather and festivals of spring — most specifically Mardi Gras, in the case of New Orleans — can be the “glimmer of hope” that diners and workers have been waiting for.