Originally Posted by
the810
Anyone's been to Switzerland recently? It looks like another location which is more or less fearless [mod edit]. What's the overall atmosphere over there?
I just arrived in Switzerland yesterday from Sweden.
We flew into Geneva via Zurich and the entire French part of CH is on somewhat of a lockdown. All restaurants, cafes etc. are closed.
I called a hotel in Lausanne in advance since we were going to stay there for a day or two and was told that while restaurants are closed, shops are open and it is allowed to walk around - with mask.
We decided to stay in Bern instead and going out last night, restaurants and cafes are open. Masks are mandatory in public spaces and we found that people do abide by these rules with the exception of a lot of young people we saw hanging around at the train station and the casino area but it was Friday night.
We will spend the last few days in Lucerne and Zurich which have similar rules where restaurants are open but mask wearing is required in public spaces if they are busy. The hotel we are staying in told me that if the road is not busy or there aren't many people around, we wouldn't need to wear a mask.
Switzerland has very few places on their risk are list since they now only put countries on the risk are list if they have higher infection rates per 100,000 than CH itself which is currently well over 1,000.
I am not sure if they will be able to keep this up but we are happy to be able to visit areas like Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen, Walensee etc. where we'll be spending most of our time going for walks, hiking etc. since we are not so much into cities but even the cities are not crowded right now and it is easy to stay away from crowds, except maybe on weekends if you want to go into a restaurant.
I'll report back in the next couple of days if I see any other developments and if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.