Radio România Internațional

Tag: crowding

  • December 18, 2021 UPDATE

    December 18, 2021 UPDATE

    VISIT The PM of Romania Nicolae Ciucă will be on a visit to
    Brussels on Monday and Tuesday, for talks with senior EU and NATO officials. According
    to the Government, on Monday the Romanian PM will have a working dinner with
    the president of the European Council Charles Michael. On Tuesday, Ciucă will
    have meetings with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der
    Leyen and with other EC members. The PM will also have a meeting with the
    secretary general of NATO Jens Stoltenberg at the NATO headquarters.


    BUDGET The
    government of Romania passed a number of measures on which the 2022 public
    budget is based. An emergency order freezing the salaries of public officials and
    other public sector staff, with 2 exceptions, was endorsed by the Cabinet with
    amendments compared to the version subject to public debate. The bill also
    includes other measures, such as a low VAT rate only for the purchase of a
    family’s first home. The new tax provisions, alongside the new Ceilings Act,
    are the foundation of next year’s state budget, and are designed to reduce
    expenditure and maintain the public deficit below 6.2% of GDP.


    ANTI-CORRUPTION The government approved the 2021-2025 National
    Anti-Corruption Strategy, the justice minister Cătălin Predoiu announced. He pointed
    out that the document is a political commitment to support all institutions
    involved in fighting corruption, and also a first goal met out of the ones
    included in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan in the judicial sector. Predoiu
    added that the Strategy is correlated with international instruments to which
    Romania is affiliated, such as GRECO and the Cooperation and Verification
    Mechanism. The CVM was introduced in January 2007, upon Romania’s and Bulgaria’s EU accession, to support the 2
    countries in overcoming deficiencies in judicial reform and in fighting
    corruption.


    BORDER As of Monday, December 20, travellers entering Romania are
    no longer required to fill in separate COVID-19 statement, because all the data
    will be included in the digital Passenger Locator Form (PLF). The measure is expected
    to help reduce waiting times at border checkpoints, including at the Henri
    Coanda Airport, near Bucharest. The transport minister Sorin Grindeanu Saturday
    requested the Airport management to take steps to streamline passenger flows
    and to avoid crowding. The request came after hundreds of people waited for a
    long time for the authorities to check their documents. Romanian border
    checkpoints are getting crowded these days, as many Romanians living abroad are
    coming home for Christmas. Queuing is reported at the checkpoints on Romania’s
    western borders, where apart from travel documents the digital Covid
    certificates and PCR tests must also be checked. In order to streamline border
    crossing, at the checkpoint in Giurgiu (south), the number of border police
    will be increased by 20%.


    MINORITIES Romania
    celebrated on December 18 the Day of Ethnic Minorities. President Klaus
    Iohannis said on this occasion that ethnic minorities make an essential
    contribution to social cohesion and that only together can a modern Romania be
    built, with no place for racism, xenophobia and intolerance. Protecting cultural
    heritage, including that of national minorities, is a priority for the Culture
    Ministry, which treasures the culture of minorities as an element contributing to
    the shaping of Romanian culture as we know it today, reads a news release
    issued by the institution.



    COVID-19 733 new COVID-19 cases
    and 64 related fatalities were reported in the last 24 hours in Romania, the
    authorities announced on Saturday. The coordinator of the vaccination campaign,
    Valeriu Gheorghiţă, announced on the other hand that the number of people
    requesting their first doses of anti Sars-CoV-2 vaccine is on the decrease. He detailed
    that the number of people who get their first vaccine doses drops by 15-25%
    from one week to the next. On Saturday only 4,500 first
    doses were administered. Meanwhile, the Omicron variant of the virus has been
    reported in 89 countries, with the number of cases doubling over 1.5-3 days in
    areas with community transmission, the WHO announced on Saturday. WHO first
    labelled Omicron a variant of concern on November 26. (tr. A.M. Popescu)

  • Crowding in border checkpoints

    Crowding in border checkpoints

    As it happens every year, the Romanians living abroad
    are beginning to come home these days to spend their winter holidays with their
    families. This is the second Christmas and New Year’s that people will
    celebrate under pandemic restrictions.


    The new rules for entering Romania, introduced by the
    authorities on December 10 to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus
    variant, Omicron, are making checkpoints even more crowded than usual. Many Romanians
    are not vaccinated and unaware of the new restrictions.


    Those who come from outside the EU must present a PCR
    test not older than 48 hours. Those who test negative, even if unvaccinated or
    not recovered from the disease, will have to isolate for 10 days, while
    travellers without a test will have to quarantine for 14 days.


    For those who come from the EU, the requirements
    include the digital certificate confirming vaccination, recovery from the
    disease or a negative PCR test not older than 72 hours. The rules apply for
    both Romanian and foreign nationals.


    Border police warn that, because people are not aware
    of these regulations, at the Nădlac 2 checkpoint on Romania’s western border, in
    8 hours as many as 1,400 people were quarantined either for 10 or for 14 days. And
    with the quarantine documents requiring time to fill in, the waiting times at
    the border are even longer.


    In order to avoid crowding, the number of agents and
    of lanes has been increased in most border points. But even so, people are
    waiting for as long as 2 hours to get into Romania.


    And so do lorries and trucks. Customs officers and
    border police say their number has been on the rise since mid-November, when fruit
    and vegetable imports went up, and the processing capacity stayed the same.


    According to border police, these days at the southern
    border, with Bulgaria, truck drivers have been waiting for as long as 2 hours, on
    the western border, in Borş 2, waiting times are around one hour, and in the
    north-east, at the Ukrainian border, the longest waiting time is 2 hours, at
    the Siret checkpoint. (tr. A.M. Popescu)