Amid concerns about the potentially more contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus, Swiss voters approved the requirement for a digital certificate to attend restaurants, bars, cafes, cinemas, museums, games and university classes.
Mandating the document was supported by 62% of the Swiss in a referendum this Sunday. Voter turnout, at 66%, was high compared to average.
Switzerland has a system of direct democracy, which encompasses three types of voter consultations: 1) mandatory referendums, to amend the Constitution, introduce emergency federal legislation for more than a year, or join an international organization; 2) popular initiatives, when a proposed new law has the endorsement of at least 100,000 signatures, and 3) optional referendums, when at least 50,000 voters ask for a new opinion on a rule in force, this Sunday’s case.
The vote had been called by citizens who considered the pass requirement, which had been in force since September, an unnecessary restriction on people’s freedom.
Opposition to the certificate grew when testing for coronaviruses, an option to vaccination, ceased to be free, leading to the proposed referendum.
Like other countries with a German population, Switzerland has found it difficult to increase the percentage of inhabitants fully vaccinated. Recommended doses have been dated so far to about 66% of its population, a rate comparable to Austria or Germany.
Despite this, the death rate per 1 million inhabitants in Switzerland is well below that of the other two German countries. In the 14 days ending November 21, she was 15 in Switzerland, 25 in Germany and 47 in Austria. The number of deaths per week is still a tenth of what it was at the worst moment at the end of last year.
In the last month, however, there has been an explosion of new weekly Covid cases in recent weeks: the number has multiplied by 8 in a month, surpassing by 42,000 in the week ending 21 November.
The emergence of the omicron variant may have helped to bring more supporters of the certificate to the polls, after weeks of debates and demonstrations —some of them violent—on the subject in the country.
Despite the support of the majority of Swiss, the laws were rejected in 2 of the 26 cantons and were passed very narrowly in another 7. The biggest passage occurred in the cantons of Basel and Zurich.
Also on Sunday, the Swiss approved a reform of the working conditions of nurses, with 61% of the votes — in only one of the cantons there was no majority.
On Friday, Switzerland followed other countries and temporarily suspended flights from southern Africa, where the first samples of the new strain were sequenced. The move led the WTO (World Trade Organization) to indefinitely postpone its main summit, the 12th Ministerial Convention, which would start this week.
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