Austria is expected to impose lockdown restrictions on millions of unvaccinated people in the coming days.
Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg told a press conference Friday that his government wanted to give the "green light" to such measures by Sunday,. Lawmakers will meet over the weekend to discuss the move, according to the news agency.
The chancellor rejected the notion of a nationwide lockdown being applied to all of Austria's citizens, telling reporters on Friday that the two-thirds of the population who had accepted the immunization would not be forced to show "solidarity" with the unvaccinated. However, he did caution that there may be some tightening of other restrictions.
Covid patients currently take up 20% of ICU beds in Austria, according to Reuters, and that level is rising fast. The country saw 67,148 new cases of Covid-19 over the past seven days — a new record weekly high, Johns Hopkins University data shows. "We have just days until we have to introduce a lockdown for unvaccinated people," Schallenberg told a press conference on Thursday.