Switzerland Today
Greetings from Bern!
Here are the latest news and stories from Switzerland on Thursday.
In the news: The Swiss authorities have so far frozen some CHF5.75 billion ($6.2 billion) of sanctioned Russian oligarch assets, with the total expected to rise as the European Union announces further measures.
- The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) announced the figure today. The total of blocked assets includes properties in tourist regions, but SECO declined to give any details of affected individuals.
- The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, said in Moscow today that he planned to discuss prisoners of war with the Russian defence ministry. He also planned to discuss the Geneva Conventions, he told a news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Maurer is in Moscow for talks on the Ukraine conflict.
- Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia and rose to become the first female US secretary of state, died yesterday aged 84. She had studied at a finishing school in Geneva, where she learnt French and changed her name from Marie Jana to Madeleine.
What’s behind the latest surge in Covid-19 cases in Europe and Asia? We talk to a Geneva-based Covid expert about what’s behind the dramatic resurgence and how concerned we should be.
“After each Covid wave, politicians, journalists, the public – but also many experts – want to see it as the last. Now we have the Omicron wave, and again they are saying, ‘it’s finished’, but it isn’t,” warned Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva.
Switzerland lifted almost all of its Covid-19 pandemic restrictions on February 17 but the country continues to experience high daily infection figures. After falling steadily from a peak in late January, the number of new cases started rising again from mid-February. The Federal Office of Public Health today reported 22,438 new infections and nine deaths within the past 24 hours.
“Mortality rates remain high in most European countries. Mortality due to Covid ranks first among all causes of mortality. This is not acceptable. We are facing a completely new pattern of mortality and we seem to accept it while we could be trying to address it more effectively,” Flahault said.
As for what’s causing this new increase in infections, he says lifting prevention measures too early – “as was the case in Switzerland or the Netherlands” – is a factor but not the only one, since Italy and France haven’t lifted measures and they are seeing the same upturn in cases.
Flahault hypothesises, based on a research paperExternal link he was involved in, that air pollution and fine particle pollution plays a role.
So how worried should we be? “Our experience from the past two years tells us that we should always be worried with Covid-19. It’s not the flu. It’s not a cold. It’s a disease that may lead to hospitalisations and deaths, and also Long Covid,” he said.
“We have also learnt that many people do not experience severe illness with Covid-19. Many think that it’s not such a big issue and they are not very worried. But if they want to be empathetic and have solidarity with those who are at risk, they should be protecting themselves and those who are more vulnerable.”
Femicide – the murder of women and girls because they are female – is underestimated in most countries because of a lack of reliable data.
This month the United Nations adopted recommendations for collecting statistics on crimes targeting women. The guiding principle behind the new framework for data collection, which Switzerland supports, is that a problem cannot be resolved if it cannot be measured.
Pauline Turuban, a SWI data journalist, looked at the definitions and numbers and the situation in Switzerland.
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