Czech morning news in brief: top stories for Jan. 21, 2021

New quotas are being implemented on food products in the Czech Republic meaning by 2027, stores for basic foodstuffs should meet the mandatory share of 73 percent of domestic supplies. In addition, it set fines for dual food quality. From 2022 stores with an area of over 400 square meters must offer at least 55 percent of selected Czech food. This applies to hundreds of basic foods such as meat and milk. Over the years, the share is expected to increase by three percent per year to the final level of 73 percent in 2027. The quota will not apply to retail outlets up to 400 square meters and specialized outlets, the exact definition of which is still lacking and should be supplemented by the Ministry of Agriculture.

Václav Havel Prague Airport handled 3.66 million passengers last year, a year-on-year drop of 79 percent. At the same time, it is the lowest number of passengers in the last 25 years. The airport announced this in a press release. The drop was largely due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Before the crisis, the airport expected further growth for 2020, but it stopped in the spring after the outbreak of COVID. It reduced the number of passengers by more than 99 percent during the spring months. In the summer, traffic gradually grew to about 600,000 passengers in July and August, but it was still well below normal. In addition, the crisis intensified again in the autumn.

The eRouška mobile application has a new, more sensitive algorithm than before which should lead to a higher number of alerts for risky contacts. Its operators confirmed the news about it on Facebook. Lukáš Trnka, a spokesman for the National Agency for Communication and Information Technologies (NAKIT), added to ČTK's question that he would still formally draw attention to meetings longer than 15 minutes at a distance of fewer than two meters. In 2020, 1.5 million people installed the application. According to him, the application does not directly measure the distance or time of the meeting. The distance is estimated based on the attenuation of the Bluetooth signal depending on the distance between the phones and the meeting time according to repeated measurements every few minutes.

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The works of Alfons Mucha, Josef Šíma and Mikuláš Medek were the most expensive of Czech art at world auctions last year. Paintings by František Kupka, Jan Zrzavý, Václav Špála or Václav Boštík were also auctioned for sums in the millions. The Artplus server, which specializes in the art market, stated that most Bohemian works significantly exceeded pre-auction estimates, but could still achieve even higher prices on the Czech market. Despite the figures from the spring auction season, anti-coronavirus measures did not affect last year's domestic auction market as much as experts expected. To buy the ten most expensive paintings of 2020, a potential bidder would need 340 million crowns. This is three million more than in the previous year and a record for Czech auctions.