Europe on alert as Covid surges

Lockdowns loom

LONDON: Covid lockdowns are looming once again across Europe as a fatal fourth wave inundates vast areas of the continent stretching from the Adriatic and the Black Sea to the Arctic Circle.

Norway, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia have all reported their highest daily infection rates to date.

While Britain’s infection rate is falling, it is still four times higher than France, averaging about 170 deaths per day compared to about 40.

Bulgaria recorded 334 deaths on Wednesday, the largest number yet, prompting the government to declare an emergency and beg fellow EU states for oxygen and beds.

Bavaria in Germany has announced a “state of catastrophe”, with its intensive care system nearing collapse. And Austria is threatening to impose a full lockdown on the unvaccinated this weekend.

“This is a real emergency,” Professor Christian Drosten, 49, one of Germany’s most eminent virologists, said on his weekly podcast. “We’re worse off than we were a year ago.”

Up to now the conventional wisdom in many affected countries was that they had moved into a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.

States with relatively high immunisation levels, such as France, Italy and Portugal, have so far been spared the worst. Those that have struggled to jab their populations, such as Slovakia, whose vaccination rate is below the global average, are suffering the most.

Part of the appeal of this reasoning was that it gave grounds for some comfort, or even for political complacency.

It implied that the fourth wave would rage among the unvaccinated and then by and large burn itself out. It would, in other words, be containable.

That wisdom is beginning to look questionable. There is evidence from German hospitals that vaccinated people have gone from making up scarcely one in 10 of hospital Covid patients to nearly half. This is partly because the clinically vulnerable who were first in line for the jab are seeing their immunity wane.

There are other reasons to be concerned. “The Delta variant has reshuffled the cards,” Professor Drosten, one of Angela Merkel’s most trusted scientific advisers, said. “Soon it will very swiftly become transmissible among the vaccinated. So we have a situation here where the virus can spread throughout the whole of society, and its spread is in fact being bolstered by vaccinated people. That’s what we are seeing at the moment.”

Germany may well be on the cusp of its most harrowing months. On present trends, its intensive care units will be full in weeks.

A booster jab campaign is under way in the country but so far only 3.3 million doses have been administered.

The federal government, caught between the twilight of the Merkel years and the beginning of a three-party ruling coalition under Olaf Scholz, has been slow to respond and has few decisive options left.

“We’ve lost control,” Alexander Kekule, 63, a professor of medical microbiology and virology , said on a podcast.