ZURICH LETTER
The outbreak of the coronavirus over the past three weeks in Swiss hospitals, whose emergency services are approaching saturation from Geneva to Zurich, would have its origins abroad. The fault of vacationers returning from European beaches, first. But also, and this is more explosive, the fault of the movements of a foreign community in particular, the Kosovars of Switzerland. They are 200,000 and the link between the Confederation and the small Albanian-speaking country of the Balkans is so strong that the latter is sometimes classified as the “twenty-seventh canton”. But all the testimonies agree: this summer, Pristina was Ibiza.
From all over Europe and elsewhere, the diaspora has returned home to party. In July, 446,000 passengers arrived at the airport in the capital of Kosovo, against 88,000 last year and 280,000 in 2019, the last “normal” year. A real festival: discos, clubs and restaurants crowded until the early hours of the morning, hundreds of giant weddings with 300 or more guests, parties everywhere, even on the beaches of Albania, and not a mask on the horizon , no protective measures since the Kosovar government had lifted them all before the holidays.
How to explain this festive rush? “Many Kosovars had not seen their relatives for two years. Because last year, the traditional summer return to the country was not possible ”, explains microbiologist Fatime Imeri, director of Laborgemeinschaft 1, a medical diagnostic laboratory in Zurich.
“Xenophobic amalgamation is a natural reflex in Switzerland when something is wrong. »Vjosa Gërvalla, host of the Albinfo news site
And then all these people returned to Switzerland in mid-August: still full planes, crowded buses, twenty hours of driving without a mask, few health checks at the border that we crossed easily thanks to the tests. PCR cans over-the-counter everywhere. Having danced all summer, the Kosovars found themselves very helpless when the Delta variant struck.
It was soon after that major Swiss hospitals began to notice that something was wrong. The intensive care units were filling up. Rather young, unvaccinated patients, mostly of foreign origin, most often Albanian speakers.
A poorly vaccinated population
From there started the idea, widely relayed by the popular press and by the nationalist party UDC, that the Kosovars returning to their host country infected the Swiss and fulfilled “Our hospital beds”. “Xenophobic amalgamation is a natural reflex in Switzerland when something is wrong, underlines Vjosa Gërvalla, host of the Albinfo information site for the Swiss Albanian-speaking diaspora. The same goes for crime statistics. In the case of the virus, it would be more appropriate to seek the responsibilities of this epidemic outbreak. “
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