Switzerland Today
Greetings from Bern,
Here are the latest news and stories doing the rounds in Switzerland on Tuesday, January 11.
In the news: partial vindication for Maudet, concern for struggling Swiss youths.
- Former Geneva minister and political golden boy Pierre Maudet has won an appeal against a conviction related to a controversial visit to Abu Dhabi in 2015, when he and his family visited the emirate on the invitation (and expense) of the ruling royals. The suspended sentence, which involved a fine of some CHF120,000 ($129,985), led to Maudet’s gradual removal from power, his exclusion from the centre-right Radical Party and a series of legal cases. Maudet has previously said that his political career is not over.
- Psychiatrists in Switzerland are concerned about the mental health of young people suffering from the disruption of the pandemic. There has been an increase in cases needing help, doctor Oliver Bilke-Hentsch told Tamedia newspapers today: he added that while girls are prone to feelings of meaninglessness and depression, boys can tend to repress problems and escape to outlets like gaming or cannabis smoking. Parents and teachers should watch for warning signs like apathy, depression, irritability or excessively impulsive behaviour.
Speculation of the day: quarantine – how long, how strict, how useful, how how?
Like in many countries, covid debates in Switzerland at the moment, when not about whether or not a de facto process of herd infection is currently underway, largely revolve around the quarantine question. Daily case numbers are sky-high, and more and more people, including those with important jobs (or jobs that can’t be done from home) are having to retreat from the physical world for a week – the current figure is almost 150,000 and it could reach 10-15% of the workforce in the next weeks, Virginie Masserey of the Federal Office for Public Health said today. But with hospital admissions also stable, how necessary is it?
On Sunday we reported that Zurich cantonal Health Minister Natalie Rickli wants to cut the quarantine period to five days – a request the business federation already made last week. Today, her Bern counterpart Pierre Alain Schnegg (who defended his green-lighting of a recent crowded ski event in yesterday’s briefing) went furtherExternal link, saying quarantines for those who have had contact with an infected person could be scrapped. Scientists are cautiously thinking similarly: today, Tanja Stadler of the Covid task force said a five-day compromise could “make sense”; super-science-spreader Marcel Salathé has previously said contact-case quarantines could be replaced by a regime of daily antigen tests.
Who decides? With cantons looking to be fed up with the autonomy they were clamouring for earlier in the pandemic, and with most of them having cut the quarantine period to seven days already, tomorrow sees the return of… the government! Health minister Berset and co., who we haven’t seen in public since well before Christmas, will however have a tough job navigating the “Omicron cul-de-sac”, as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung says in its overview todayExternal link. Keep beefing up the contact tracing system? Enforce the wearing of FFP2 masks? We’ll only know tomorrow. As for the quarantine question, while we don’t know what will be decided, we do know it will be on the agenda: Finance Minister Ueli Maurer spilled this nugget to Swiss public television last night.
Verdict of the day: Gruyère AOC loses battle in the cheese war.
Gruyère cheese has lost its appeal to a federal court in Virginia to receive protected status in the US, the AP reportsExternal link. Judge T.S. Ellis said that while the name may in the past have referred to cheese from the Gruyères area of Switzerland and various parts of France, “decades of importation, production, and sale of cheese labelled GRUYERE produced outside [these regions] have eroded the meaning of that term and rendered it generic”. So, while Cognac, Champagne, and Roquefort still enjoy protection of origin in the US, gruyère has become… “generic”. According to unconfirmed courtroom reports, on learning this, gruyère melted into tears, then a fondue. After re-solidifying, it said it planned to appeal to a higher court.
Online debate of the day: veggie canteen in Lucerne still making waves.
In Lucerne, not cheese but meat has been on trial after the university announced last year that the student canteen would serve only vegetarian and vegan food. After a predictable uproar on social media, defending the downtrodden cause of dead meat, the issue has even become political, the Tages-Anzeiger writes today. A conservative-backed motion in the cantonal parliament demanded that Lucerne’s government force the university to scrap its decision, lest students be left with “no other choice” than to eat vegetarian (which, let’s face it, must have been at least part of the original motivation). In any case, the Lucerne government, loath to get involved in this 21st-century minefield, politely turned down the motion. Besides, it said, it seems that in the meantime the experiment has been reconsidered: meat, albeit exclusively Swiss meat, is again available on the university’s menu.
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