ATHENS – Anticipating more restrictions over the rising Omicron Variant of COVID-19 for the New Year in 2022, Greek restaurant and eatery owners said those would wipe out many of them although they got a pass for New Year’s Eve.

“New restrictions on the food service sector without support measures are tantamount to destroying the industry,” POESE said in a letter to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Finance Minister Christos Staikouras, Development Minister Adonis Georgiadis, said Kathimerini.

The measures would limit how long facilities could stay open, requiring restaurants, bars, cafes, taverns and eateries to close at midnight and not allow people to stand and have a minimum of six people at a table but more restrictions that are even tougher were being considered.

The union said that businesses have bought supplies and have numerous reservations from customers for New Year’s Eve but that requiring them to shut and stop celebrating as 2022 rings in “will be disastrous,” before the government said they would be allowed to be open until 2 a.m.

New restrictions will be added to the existing ones, “essentially placing the sector in lockdown, without any supportive measures,” the union statement said as restaurants already are allegedly prohibited from allowing in the unvaccinated with no reports if they are or if violators are penalized.

Mitsotakis said he wanted to go easy on New Year’s Eve to accelerate a slow recovery from the pandemic but it wasn’t certain whether how hard the measures that would take place other than that night would hurt the beleaguered eateries.