Half a world holds its breath
The head of the World Health Organisation is warning that countries in the northern hemisphere are at a ‘‘critical juncture’’ as Covid-19 cases and deaths continue to rise.
‘‘The next few months are going to be very tough, and some countries are on a dangerous track,’’ WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva yesterday.
Curfews to rein in nightlife and other opportunities for the virus to spread are some of the increasingly drastic measures European nations are enforcing to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
More than two-thirds of people living in France are subject to a nightly curfew that started yesterday, hours after health authorities announced that the country had joined Spain in surpassing 1 million confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic.
France became the second country in Western Europe and the seventh worldwide to reach that number of known infections, after reporting 42,032 new daily cases.
Of the 445,000 confirmed cases the WHO had recorded in the previous 24 hours, nearly half were in Europe, said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19.
Experts say the real numbers of infections are probably much higher than the ones governments are reporting because of a lack of widespread testing early on and the fact that some people don’t develop symptoms.
In Italy, where the governors
of the three regions that include Rome, Milan and Naples declared overnight curfews earlier this week, Rome has moved to make ‘‘nightlife’’ hours even shorter for young people who tend to hang out in trendy piazzas, carousing for hours without masks.
Protesters in Naples, angry at the regional curfew and the local governor’s vow to put the region under lockdown to try to tame surging Covid-19 infections, clashed with police yesterday.
A 41⁄ 2- hour nightly curfew comes into effect today in the Greek capital, Athens, and the country’s second-largest city of Thessaloniki, as well as several
other areas deemed to have high infection rates.
Restrictions on European daily life even extend to cancelling the one-day autumn session of the 31-seat parliament on Greenland, after a member of the assembly’s financial committee was in contact with a person who had tested positive.
A helicopter flew a Covid-19 patient from a Dutch hospital to a German intensive care unit yesterday, the first such international airlift, amid soaring rates of infection in the Netherlands.
Flevohospital spokesman Peter Pels said flying patients across an international border
was a last resort after other hospitals in the region said their intensive care units couldn’t take them. Germany is also in talks to take patients from the Czech Republic.
Bars, restaurants and most shops have closed across Wales for 17 days, starting yesterday, to curb surging coronavirus cases. Most businesses will close, high school students will be taught online, and people will have to avoid non-essential journeys.
The United Kingdom has Europe’s deadliest coronavirus numbers, with more than 44,500 confirmed deaths, including 1756 in Wales.
■ The United States is poised to enter the worst stretch ever of the pandemic, with cases spiking and the country on the edge of shattering its daily record for infections in the next few days.
The current surge is already considerably more widespread than the waves from the last northern spring and summer.
On Friday, the number of cases topped 70,000 for the first time since July. Hospitals are reporting shortfalls of basic drugs needed to treat Covid-19.
Hospitalisations increased in 38 states over the past week, and are rising so quickly that many facilities in the West and Midwest are already overwhelmed. The number of deaths nationally has crested above 1000 in recent days.
More than 8.3 million Americans so far have been infected with the coronavirus, and at least 222,000 have died. The US has hit the stretch of holidays and cold weather which experts have long warned will send cases soaring even higher.
As the US and Europe grapple with fresh surges in coronavirus cases, the outbreak in India is slowing for the first time since the pandemic began.
After seven straight months in which cases increased relentlessly, culminating in a devastating September surge, the number of new infections per day in India has dropped sharply in October.
Last month, the country hit a peak of nearly 100,000 cases in a single day, a record in the pandemic. Since then, however, daily cases have fallen by about half and deaths by about a third.
India is no longer on track to overtake the US as the country with the most coronavirus cases.