Europe is counting cases and carries on
ROME >> Customers in the Rome bookstore paid no attention to the circular stickers on the floor instructing them to stamp out COVID by maintaining “a distance of at least 1 meter.”
“These are things from the past,” said Silvia Giuliano, 45, who wore no mask as she browsed paperbacks. She described the red signs, with their crossed-out, spiky coronavirus spheres, as artifacts “like bricks of the Berlin Wall.”
All across Europe, faded stickers, signs and billboards stand as ghostly remnants of past struggles against COVID. But while the vestiges of the pandemic's deadliest days are everywhere, so is the virus.
A common refrain heard throughout Europe is that everyone has COVID as the BA.5 omicron subvariant fuels an explosion of cases across the continent. Governments, however, are not cracking down, including in the previously strictest nations, in large part because they are not seeing a significant uptick in severe cases, nor crowded intensive care units, nor waves of death. And Europeans have clearly concluded they have to live with the virus.
Seats bearing faded blue social-distancing signs urging Paris Metro riders to keep this spot free are almost always taken. Droves of unmasked Germans pass by tattered signs in stores and restaurants reading “Maskenpflicht,” or mask requirement. In a construction materials store north of Madrid, the cashier walks the aisles without a mask before sitting behind a window of Plexiglas. On a recent day in Caffe Sicilia in Noto, Sicily, the feet of three different people stood in a single “Keep Safe Distance” circles they clamored over cannoli.
And many people are traveling again, both within Europe and from outside its borders, bringing much-needed tourist money to nations desperate to bolster their economies.
“This is the way it is,” said Andrea Crisanti, a professor of microbiology who served as a top consultant to Italian leaders during the coronavirus emergency. One silver lining, he said, was that summer infections would create more immunity for the traditionally more difficult winter months. But letting the virus circulate at such enormous levels, he said, also created a “moral duty” on the part of governments to protect the elderly and otherwise vulnerable who remained at risk of serious disease despite vaccination.
“We need to change our paradigm. I don't think the measures aimed at reducing transmission have any future,” he said, listing reasons including social exhaustion with restrictions, greater acceptance of risk, and the biology of a virus had become so infectious that “there is nothing that can stop it.”
That seems the case everywhere in Europe, where officials take solace in the apparently low incidence of serious disease and death, even as some experts worry about the toll on the vulnerable, the possibility that routine infection could lead to long COVID-19 and the increased potential for mutations leading to more dangerous versions.
The “element of randomness” that generated the new mutations was “concerning,” said Christophe Fraser, a public health researcher at the University of Oxford. Across Britain, COVID cases have tripled or more since late May, according to a survey run by the country's Office of National Statistics.
“Infections are showing no signs of decreasing, with rates approaching levels last seen in March this year at the peak of the omicron BA.2 wave,” said Sarah Crofts, who heads the analytical team for the statistics office. Hospitalizations have more than quadrupled since May, according to government data. But deaths caused by the virus, while on the rise, were not approaching the levels recorded at the start of the year.
“Overall, from a public health perspective, we need to remain vigilant, but this isn't a cause to reverse course,” said Neil Ferguson, a public health researcher at Imperial College London.