The state announced the measure for the Melk district on Thursday. On Friday morning, the District Commission of Melk issued an ordinance based on the high-risk areas decree of the Ministry of Health. A 3G certificate is required to leave the region from Saturday onwards. Exceptions, for example for children up to the age of twelve or passing through without stopping, were defined in the four-page document. A similar ordinance will also follow from the Scheibbs district administration. It should be issued on Friday.
Departure tests in the Scheibbs district bordering the Melk district became necessary because the seven-day incidence averaged over seven consecutive days exceeded the threshold of 500. This was wafer-thin the case – according to calculations based on data from the Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), the value on Friday was 501.8.
The Scheibbs district had already been subjected to exit controls in the first half of the year. The statutory city of Wiener Neustadt and the districts of Wiener Neustadt-Land and Neunkirchen were also affected in Lower Austria from mid-March to the end of April.
According to a decree by the Ministry of Health in the two districts, the checks can end this time when the seven-day incidence falls below 400. On Friday it was far from that. The AGES dashboard gave the Melk district the highest value in Austria with 723, while the Scheibbs district had 567.8.
Alternatively, the controls could be stopped if – similar to the end of September in the Upper Austrian district of Braunau – the vaccination rate in the districts reaches 60 percent and the seven-day incidence is then less than 500. The current vaccination rate for the Melk district is given by the Notruf NÖ dashboard as 59.9 percent, and 57.7 percent for the Scheibbs district.
The district of Melk, which is just over 1,000 square kilometers in size, has a population of more than 78,000. It includes 40 communities. In terms of area, the Scheibbs district is equal, but with more than 41,000 inhabitants it is sparsely populated and is divided into 18 municipalities. Since the two districts border one another, the result is a high-incidence area with more than 2000 square kilometers and over 119,000 inhabitants.
