Happy New Year! and welcome to the first Znüni News of 2021. I hope that you were able to enjoy the end of year celebrations despite all the restrictions and that you are facing 2021 full of hope and positivity.
I thought we would start the year by dispelling some Fake News made in Switzerland. You probably heard of the 200 brits who upon finding themselves in quarantine in Verbier, simply upped their skis and vanished into the night? The story went around the world only to turn out to be fake news. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag investigated after finding it curious that 200 people could simply vanish in the middle of the night and no one would notice. The last train to leave Verbier is at 20.17 and no one recalled masses of Brits leaving on it; it would have taken around 50 rental cars to get all 200 people out of the village, hard to do that unnoticed and the car rental agencies would have been privy about this. The journalists tried to contact the head of communication who started the whole story only to find that he has been fired and would not return their calls. The head of tourism denies any veracity in the story. None of the hotels have contacted the police to make a formal complaint about customers breaking quarantine and/or leaving without paying. The police said that they made spot checks on 150 of the 454 Brits in quarantine in the canton of Wallis and of those only 12 had left the region without informing the autorities. Communication gone wrong or wilful disinformation?
The second story certainly falls under the wilful disinformation category. A 91 year old resident of a care home in Emmen died a week after having the vaccine against Covid-19. The story circulated last week making people wonder how safe the vaccine really is. Until it turned out that the doctor who tended to the patient, recorded his death and spread the story is a coronavirus sceptic and that the deceased had many other underlying health issues. Other health experts reviewed the case and confirmed that there was no correlation between the patient’s death and the vaccine. The doctor has had his contract with the care home terminated.
But here is a real fact, your current car vignette is valid until January 31st 2021 after which you will have to display the new car vignette or risk being fined!
Sources for our stories: Luzerner Zeitung, SRF, Tages Anzeiger, Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag, Le Temps, Zentralplus and the Pilatus Radio app.
