It's Germany again

It's still summer outside, but Germany has already decided that now is the winter of discontent for Prague hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions. Yesterday's decision to require a negative test or two weeks of quarantine for those arriving in Germany from Prague is one of the biggest covid moments yet from the Czech perspective. It means that there is no light at the end of the tunnel for hundreds of Prague businesses dependent on foreign tourists. Angela Merkel is the most powerful woman in the world, and Ursula von der Leyen is No. 4, but they haven't yet used their weight to agree on a European approach to the health/wealth trade-off that goes deeper than just the number of covid cases, one that allows covid-affected businesses to survive. When we wrote in March that Germany was the single biggest risk factor for Czechs, one of our German readers called it BS. Yet six months later, Czechs are still - or again, if you prefer - hostage to their western neighbors.