Every person who has been in a risk area and ends up in Zurich must fill out a form. This form is given by the airline company in Zurich. These statistics are then reported to the Zurich health department so that they can enforce contact tracing, explains Zurich security director Mario Fehr. "So far we haven't had enough data." That is why a new deal was negotiated with the airlines.

How Bern benefits

The other cantons do not have the same possibility of collecting such data. The airports in Geneva, Basel and Bern are significantly smaller - most returnees travel via Zurich. Mario Fehr told SRF: "We are happy when the other cantons join our initiative." Bern has now done that, as confirmed by Gundekar Giebel, spokesman for the Bernese health department.

The people who spend the night stay or live here in Bern will in future be reported to the Canton of Bern from Zurich. "This enables us to quickly check whether everyone who has to be in self-quarantine has reported." Under the current rules, the authorities requires people to report to the health department upon return from risk areas. “There are currently around 2500 people in quarantine in the canton of Bern. But we don't know the number of unreported cases “, says Gundekar Giebel. "With the new data we can find this number of unreported cases".

What about data protection?

When asked whether the data protection officer had been informed about this data collection, the Zurich security director Mario Fehr said: “We are in a special situation. It is about the health of the population and about enforcing the quarantine of people who come from risk countries, "that is central, so Fehr. In his opinion, this measure is permissible and now decisive, because now the people from the risk countries are returning from their holidays.

(translated from German by Xiaoyan Hu)

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