Learn to live with virus, EU leaders say
Italian premier allows restaurants, bars and beach facilities to open
In separate, stark warnings, two major European leaders bluntly told their citizens that the world needs to adapt to living with the coronavirus and cannot wait to be saved by the development of a vaccine.
The comments by Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came as governments worldwide and many US states struggled with restarting economies blindsided by the pandemic.
With 36 million newly unemployed in the US alone, economic pressures are building even as authorities acknowledge that reopening risks setting off new waves of infections and deaths.
Pushed hard by Italy’s regional leaders and weeks in advance of an earlier timetable, Conte allowed restaurants, bars and beach facilities to open yesterday, the same day that church services can resume and shops reopen.
Calculated risk
“We are facing a calculated risk, in the awareness ... that the epidemiological curve could go back up,” Conte said. “We are confronting this risk, and we need to accept it, otherwise we would never be able to relaunch.”
Conte added that Italy could “not afford’’ to wait until a vaccine was developed. Health experts say the world could be months, if not years, away from having a vaccine available to everyone despite the scientific gold rush now on to create one.
Britain’s Johnson, who was hospitalised last month with a serious bout of Covid-19, speculated Sunday that a vaccine may not be developed at all, despite the huge global effort to produce one.
“I said we would throw everything we could at finding a vaccine,” Johnson wrote in the Mail on Sunday newspaper. “There remains a very long way to go, and I must be frank that a vaccine might not come to fruition.”
Coronavirus has infected over 4.6 million people and killed more than 312,000 worldwide, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University that experts say under counts the true toll of the pandemic. The US has reported over 88,000 dead and Europe has seen at least 160,000 deaths.