ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Switzerland’s response to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of federalism. In mid-February 2020, the Swiss authorities and citizenry were confident that they would survive the COVID-19 outbreak in distant China without any significant damage—just as the country had come through two world wars largely unscathed. The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent government measures caused a sharp drop in Swiss economic activity between March and June 2020, when social and economic life in Switzerland virtually ground to a halt. Switzerland is widely known to be one of the most decentralized federal countries worldwide. By the time the pandemic hit Switzerland, the country had just fully revised its legal framework to deal with public health crises: the “Epidemics Act” has been in force since early 2016. It regulates the timely detection, monitoring, prevention, and control of communicable human diseases.
