Switzerland Today

Thursday’s briefing from Bern: Switzerland is a “high-price island” when it comes to medical testing, and the latest noise around the army’s purchase of new fighter jets.

© Keystone / Gaetan Bally

In the news: pricey medical testing, renewable energy boost, and the outcome of a terror investigation.

• Medical tests are “disproportionately” expensive in Switzerland, the price watchdog said today. Patients here pay 2.3 times more for tests done in specialised labs and 4.5 times more for analyses in a doctor’s office than in France, Germany and the Netherlands. This means annual avoidable expenses of some CHF1 billion for Swiss health insurers and CHF500 million for private households.
• The government wants to speed up legal procedures to boost the construction of large-scale hydroelectric and wind energy installations, it said today. Faced with possible future energy shortages, especially in winter, the goal is to prevent necessary projects being blocked for years by local objections. The government has also mooted tax breaks for the installation of solar panels on new buildings.
• Swiss prosecutors have closed proceedings against two men for lack of evidence that they were involved in a November 2020 terror attack in Vienna, when four people were shot dead. The pair had been arrested after it emerged they had visited the shooter months before the incident. One of the men has however been convicted of belonging to a banned organisation as well as possessing violent images.

© Keystone / Alexandra Wey

Noisy neighbours: new army jets are loud, but how loud?

Debates around the Swiss decision to buy 36 new F-35 fighter jets just won’t lie down. First, the army only just managed to win a tight vote on financing in September 2020. Almost as soon as this was over, left-wing groups said they would launch another initiative – against the F-35s specifically. Then the purchase almost set off a diplomatic row with France, which feels it was unfairly treated by the Swiss opting for US-made planes; then it turned out the planes will be pricier than planned – over CHF6 billion.

The latest problem is that they will be too noisy. According to a report published last night by federal research group EMPA, the F-35s will be louder than the current F/A-18s used by the army: by 3 decibels when taking off, 1 decibel when landing, and 5 decibels when driving around. While groups from areas near army bases are worried about this, the defence ministry has played it down: the planes will make fewer (and longer) training flights than before, which will compensate for the noise, it said.

But how much louder is a decibel? Is it all just noise about nothing? Nobody seems to agree. The defense ministry said “three decibels represents a difference which is hardly perceptible on a daily basis by the human ear”. A psychiatrist and sleep expert in today’s Le Temps said three decibels means “a noise twice as strong”, which can lead to bad sleep, which could lead to heart disease… In the NZZ and SRF, the assumption is that it takes an increase of ten decibels before loudness is doubled! Who is right? That’s beyond the scope of this briefing. But with a pacifist campaign against the jets still brewing, we haven’t heard the last of it.

© Keystone / Christian Beutler

Ulysses: still trying to read it, 100 years later

Swiss media have been full of the writer James Joyce this week, with yesterday marking the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, his most famous work. WOZ tells us how the Irish author wrote a “considerable amount of the book while living in Zurich between 1915 and 1919”, while public broadcaster SRF reportsExternal link today on a centenary Ulysses exhibition currently running at the Strauhof museum in Zurich.

The coup of the week however goes to the members of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, who slipped a fake death noticeExternal link into yesterday’s NZZ, mourning a certain Patrick Dignam – the character whose funeral is described in detail in chapter six of Ulysses. The foundation used the notice to plug a public reading this Saturday in Zurich’s Fluntern cemetery, where Joyce is buried. Leopold Bloom, the hero of the novel, who worked as a crafty advertising executive in 1904 Dublin, would surely have approved.