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Schengen Area, a free-travel designated area inside the European Union, meant for free access and movement of people all around the European continent has come under strife as multiple countries have continued stricter and more restrictive measures to combat the new Omicron variant.
Many countries have imposed severe restrictions or have outright banned countries, like Germany who recently banned 39 countries from entering the countries except German nationals returning from respective countries. Spain meanwhile, has imposed restrictions on every other Schengen area country for travel inside Spain with everyone needing to show a PCR within the timespan of 72 hours to permit travel into Spain.
Some countries meanwhile have slowly shortened the time of vaccine validity followed by the European Union decision to make vaccine certifications valid up to only nine months. Austria and the Czech Republic have been implementing this system since December 2021 and January 2022, respectively. Other countries like Greece, Latvia, and Iceland have only recently implemented this restriction while the Netherlands will only start to shorten vaccine validity from Feb 1.
Many have criticized this move by the countries, as many people in the countries have not been supplied a booster shot which means that it might cause travel bottlenecks as people can't even get a booster shot to travel and might find themselves trapped by the new regulations.
But with many countries giving booster shots only 5 months of vaccine validity in countries like Greece, booster shots may only have a superficial impact in making air travel more accessible in areas of Europe.
While there have been efforts to have a single unified restriction in the European Union like the European Union Digital COVID-19 Document (EUDCC), the rise in cases and the differing circumstances in each country make it unlikely to be effectively enforced.
Photo Courtesy: [Datastat/Wikipedia Commons]
