A popular ditty among the Alpine party set celebrates the Tyrolean village of Ischgl as a “white winter’s dream.” For recent visitors, the town has become something more akin to a prolonged nightmare.

The lively après-ski scene that draws millions to the town every winter proved to be a perfect incubator for the coronavirus. Authorities believe that busloads of European visitors departed the village known as the “Ibiza of the Alps” (and not in a good way) in late February, leaving with more than the usual mountain tan and hangover.

By the time Austrian officials realized the extent of the outbreak, the damage was done. Health authorities across Scandinavia have traced several hundred cases to Ischgl. On Tuesday, Norway said nearly 40 percent of the more than 1,400 infections in the country originated in Austria. National authorities believe hundreds of additional cases in both Austria and Germany are connected directly to Ischgl.

While Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has won high praise at home and abroad for his aggressive response to the coronavirus threat, critics say Vienna’s sudden policy shift last week only occurred after it realized the situation in Tyrol had taken a dire turn. Despite early warnings from other countries about problems in Ischgl, Tyrolean officials resisted taking assertive action, fearing the negative impact on local business. The entire region's economy depends on tourism. Vienna didn’t intervene.

“Greed took precedence over the responsibility for the health of the community and guests,” Austrian daily Der Standard concluded in a commentary this week.

Vienna ignored Iceland’s decision to issue a travel advisory for Tyrol.

The first sign of serious trouble emerged on March 1, when officials in Iceland discovered that 15 passengers on an Icelandair flight arriving the day before from Munich had tested positive for the coronavirus. Fourteen of the infected had been in Ischgl.

Iceland warned officials in Austria, but health authorities there dismissed the concerns out of Reykjavik.

“From a medical point of view it's improbable that the infections occurred in Tyrol,” Franz Katzgraber, a top health official in the province, said in a statement. The Tyroleans suggested it was more likely that a passenger on the plane who had been to Italy, and who also tested positive, infected the group from Ischgl.

Vienna ignored Iceland’s decision to issue a travel advisory for Tyrol.

In the days that followed, however, similar reports of infections among Ischgl tourists arrived from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany.

On March 7, a barkeeper in a popular Ischgl après-ski spot tested positive.

Austrian authorities didn’t act until they discovered an additional 15 people he had been in close contact with at work also had the virus. On March 10, authorities ordered all bars in Ischgl to close, but left both the ski lifts and the hotels open.

The virus continued to spread, forcing the government on March 13 to take the unprecedented step of placing the entire valley surrounding Ischgl, known as Paznauntal, under quarantine along with St. Anton, another popular ski area nearby.

Even then, officials allowed the lifts, which carry skiers up the mountains in cramped gondolas, to continue to operate until Sunday.

Christof Lang, a journalist with German news channel n-TV, arrived in Ischgl on March 5 with five friends. They all left the town three days later infected.

“The scandal is that they had indications a week before we arrived that there could have been infections and they ignored them,” he said of the Austrian authorities.

Austrian officials, however, insist they did everything they could to halt the spread of the virus as soon as they became aware of the severity of the outbreak.

“I think the authorities in Tyrol acted exactly as they should have,” Bernhard Tilg, a senior politician in the state, told Austrian public broadcaster ORF this week. “The foreign media make it sound as if coronavirus originated in Ischgl, but that’s not the case.”

The events surrounding the Ischgl outbreak have received intense media attention in Germany, where most tourists to Austria come from.

Tyrolean officals have also come under scrutiny in Austria for not preventing travelers leaving the Ischgl area from spending the night in other towns in the region before heading home, something hundreds of them did, including in Innsbruck, the region's capital. Just how far those travelers spread the virus remains unclear.

About one quarter of the 1,648 coronavirus cases in Austria are in Tyrol, a state that accounts for less than 10 percent of the country’s population.

Kurz’s government, meanwhile, has responded to the crisis by enforcing some of Europe’s strictest measures to keep the virus' spread from accelerating.

In recent days the government has shut down virtually all public life and barred people from leaving their homes with few exceptions.

Even the ski areas are closed.

It would be a "very, very long time" before things return to normal in the Alpine nation, Kurz said this week.