World braces for the second wave

FROM Italy to Kansas, health authorities are increasingly warning that the question isn’t whether a second wave of infections and deaths will hit, but when and how badly.

As more countries and US states chaotically reopen for business, even as their own infection rates are at different stages, managing those future infections is as important as preventing them.

In India, which partly eased its virus lockdown this week, health authorities scrambled yesterday to contain an outbreak at a massive market.

Germany warned of a second and even third wave, and threatened to re-impose virus restrictions if new cases can’t be contained. Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday met with the country’s 16 governors to discuss further easing restrictions that have crippled Europe’s largest economy.

“There will be a second wave, but the problem is to which extent. Is it a small wave or a big wave? It’s too early to say,” said Olivier Schwartz, head of the virus and immunity unit at France’s Pasteur Institute.

Discussions about what a second wave would look like are coming even as many areas are still struggling with the first wave of this pandemic.

An Associated Press analysis found that US infection rates outside the New York City area are in fact rising, notably in rural areas.

“Make no mistakes: This virus is still circulating in our community, perhaps even more now than in previous weeks,” said Linda Ochs, director of the Health Department in Shawnee County, Kansas.

A century ago, the Spanish flu epidemic’s second wave was far deadlier than its first, in part because authorities allowed mass gatherings from Philadelphia to San Francisco.

As Italy’s lockdown eased this week, Dr Silvio Brusaferro, president of the Superior Institute of Health, urged “a huge investment” of resources to train medical personnel to monitor possible new cases. He said tracing apps — which are being built by dozens of countries and companies and touted as a possible technological solution — aren’t enough to manage future waves of infection.

“We are not out of the epidemic. I don’t want people to think we go back to normal,” said Dr Giovanni Rezza, the head of the institute’s infectious diseases department.

Britain has begun recruiting 18,000 people to trace contacts of people infected, and aims to have them ready to work later in May.

(AP)