Limited new Covid restrictions were announced last night

HUNGARY - In Brief 04 Nov 2020 by Istvan Racz

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PM Orbán announced new Covid restrictions last night, following a number of recent official indications that tighter rules were about to come. Specifically, a night curfew from midnight to 5 am was introduced immediately, together with the instruction to close bars and nightclubs, and a rule that visitors must be seated with at least three seats of distance from each other at cinema, theatre, sports, etc events. From Monday, wearing face masks has been ordered in restaurants except when guests are seated at tables. Mr. Orbán stressed the importance of disciplined implementation and promised tough control by the police. The government will ask parliament to extend the existing extraordinary legal order by 90 days to underlie the new rules.To us, the new rules seem to represent only a limited amount of tightening. The good news about it is that the net additional impact of the economy is likely to be quite small: e.g. all bars, clubs, restaurants, clubs etc. had to be closed by 11pm under the previous set of Covid rules anyway. We would not say that the tightening announced yesterday is unimportant or just symbolic, but given the current negative trend of the epidemic, there is a clear risk that the new measures will not be sufficient. Mr. Orbán previously promised the start of Covid vaccination by January, to which we would attach a decent-size question mark, and now he said that without the new restrictions, the capacities of the domestic health care sector would come under unbearable pressure by mid-December. To avoid the latter, we think that a great deal of improvement would be needed in controlling the virus.At present, Hungary's daily new infections curve (7-day a...