A third of Austria’s Covid victims lived in care homes

In the first two years of the pandemic, 2020 and 2021, a total of 13,365 people died after testing positive for Covid-19 in Austria. A third of those (4,237) lived in care homes. In 2020, care home residents made up 42 percent of victims while last year they accounted for one in four deaths. Most of these deaths occurred between November 2020 and January 2021, so shortly before residents were able to receive the Covid-19 vaccine.

Criticism over implementation of Austria’s vaccine mandate

There is no national solution for recording medical exemptions to Austria’s new vaccination requirement, with each of Austria’s nine regions responsible for this, for which some regional leaders have criticised the national government.

Austrian writer Gerhard Roth dies aged 79

The Graz native won many literary awards for his work, with his best known piece being Die Archive des Schweigens made up of seven volumes.

Vienna is Austria’s traffic jam capital

That’s according to data from navigation company Tomtom, which found that drivers in Vienna in 2021 had to expect their journeys to take 29 percent longer than they would in traffic jam-free conditions. That’s an increase from the year before, and means that a ’30 minute drive’ in reality took 39 minutes on average.

Tomtom calculated that the average commuter (making a return trip for 230 days of the year) spent 66 hours of 2021 in traffic jams. But that increased if those journeys always occurred during rush hour: the longest delays occurred in Vienna between Tuesday and Thursday between 4 pm and 6 pm.

Salzburg came second in the ranking, followed by Graz, Innsbruck and Linz.

Winter Olympics update

Austria’s medal tally is now at eight: two golds, four silvers and two bronze medals after skier Katharina Liensberger picked up a silver in the Alpine Skiing Women’s Slalom.