Coronavirus: Calls grow for ‘return to normality’

Travel abroad and it’s almost like time travelling to a period prior to the pandemic: many countries in Europe, and elsewhere, no longer have any Covid-19 restrictions at all.

It’s within that context that the government’s Covid-19 advisory group meets on Wednesday to discuss potential relaxations to the restrictions, amid calls for a reduction in the number of tests – which on some days surpass 100,000. Cabinet is set to make a decision on tweaking the measures on Thursday.

Chris Christodoulou of Sepaek, the association of franchise restaurants, has called on the health ministry to immediately scrap the restrictions and “return to normality”.

“Why is it only us [Cyprus]? In other countries abroad there is not a single restrictive measure in place, no one is being asked for a SafePass and no one is being hunted down with devastating fines because they weren’t wearing their mask correctly – for God’s sake, this can’t go on any longer,” Christodoulou told Alpha news on Tuesday morning.

For his part, Health Minister Michalis Hadjipantelas earlier this week was pressed on the point of a considerable number of countries scrapping all Covid-19 measures entirely – to which he replied that other nations, namely China, have “different measures”.

“I am glad to see many countries in Europe do not have measures,” the minister said “but we have to see that in China they have different measures, so these are some situations that we look at very carefully,” he told reporters on Sunday.

Ideas which have been floated and reported on in the media is the scrapping of the outdoor mask mandate, a restriction which is almost entirely ignored, loosely enforce and yet some government advisors appear to still be hesitant in advocating for its removal.

But Christodoulou argued that the scrapping of restrictions should go much further than that: “We’re calling for the immediate end to the restrictions, as has already happened in other sectors – and rightly so – such as in supermarkets, bakeries, pharmacies and so on,” he said.

“It must end, we must return to normality… And how do you expect all this [the measures] to work in light of tourism?” he queried.

Many nations across Europe no longer require any proof of vaccination or of a negative test to gain entry into the country or for activities once inside, while Cyprus still requires that visitors fill out an in-depth traveller form and the use of the SafePass for many activities once on the island.