More restrictions regarding events and opening hours of bars, pubs and other catering facilities will be introduced as announced by the new Minister of Health Roman Prymula on September 23. These new restrictions will apply from Thursday, September 24. Prymula became the new Health Minister on September 21 after his predecessor Adam Vojtěch stepped down from the office.
New Restrictions
From Thursday, September 24, new countermeasures are coming in place. Indoor events will be limited to ten visitors if seatings aren’t available, while outdoor events will be limited to 50 people. Indoor events with available seatings will be allowed to host up to 1 000 people if the area is divided into sectors, for outdoor events the number of visitors will be limited up to 2 000, which also applies to sports matches. However, for other events held in places that cannot be split into separated sectors, the limit of 500 people inside and 1 000 people outside remains (if seatings are available).
Bars, pubs, clubs, and restaurants will have to stay closed from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM which will also apply from Thursday, September 24. The new Minister of Health, however, promised that these particular restrictions will be in place only for a period of two weeks if the situation gets better and the rapid growth of new COVID-19 cases slows down.
Other Restrictions and Countermeasures
There is also a chance more countermeasures will be announced in the next couple of days, but they should supposedly only affect hair salons. As the minister claims, they won’t be closed – as they were during the first COVID-19 wave in spring – but these new countermeasures will only say that hair salons will have to be regularly disinfected.
Coronavirus is already affecting universities and their students. Some of them, such as the Masaryk University in Brno, are now closed to the public and most of them have also switched to distance learning.
In some hospitals and social facilities, visits are now banned with the exceptions of visits to minors and the dying. The presence of fathers at birth is still allowed, but only if the specified conditions are met. More specifically, they can be only present while wearing a face mask or a respirator, their body temperature must not exceed 37 °C, they have no symptoms of coronavirus, and the mother is isolated from others.
On the other hand, another state of emergency is still not ruled out as the number of new cases is still growing.
Updated on September 24: Stores must also provide customers with disposable gloves, plastic bags, or other hand protection for free. A similar thing applies to farmers markets – all stalls must provide customers with disinfection and they must be situated at least 2 meters apart. Disinfection must be provided also to visitors of libraries.
Strict hygienic measures apply also to textile shops – customers can try on clothes only after disinfecting their hands and the clothes they tried but didn’t purchase must be separated from the rest of the clothes for at least 24 hours.
The Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tomáš Petříček, also announced that Austria will put Prague on its list of epidemiologically unsafe places as of September 28. A negative test would be therefore required upon arrival.
Let us know and get your residence permit as soon as possible to be safe in the future in case the pandemic indeed returns in full force. Having a residence permit is the best way of making sure you’ll be able to return to the Czech Republic even if the borders are closed again.
If you don’t want to miss out on any important news, subscribe to our special autumn newsletter mapping not only the current coronavirus situation, and don’t forget to check this blog.
Sources of the information: Aktuálně.cz and SeznamZprávy.cz article I and article II, Novinky.cz
Source of the image: Unsplash.com
