San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Secondwave of infections has hit Europe
ROME — Europe’s second wave of coronavirus infections has struck well before flu season even has started, with intensive care wards filling up again and bars shutting down. Makingmatters worse, authorities say, is a widespread case of “COVID fatigue.”
Record high daily infections in several Eastern European countries and sharp rebounds in the hard-hit west have made clear that Europereallynever crushed the COVID-19 curve as hoped, after springtime lockdowns.
Spain last week declared a state of emergency forMadrid amid increasing tensions between local and national authorities over virus containment measures.
Germany offered up soldiers to help with contact tracing in newly flaring hot spots. Italymandated masks outdoors and warned that for the first time since the country became the European epicenter of the pandemic, the health system was facing “significant critical issues” as hospitals fill up.
The Czech Republic’s “Farewell COVID” party in June, when thousands of Prague residents dined outdoors at a 500-yard-long table across the Charles Bridge to celebrate their victory over the virus, seems painfully naive now that the country has the highest per capita infection rate on the continent, at 398 per 100,000 residents.
“I have to say clearly that the situation is not good,” Czech Interior Minister Jan
Hamacek acknowledged last week.
Epidemiologists and residents are pointing the finger at governments for having failed to seize on the summertime lull in cases to prepare adequately for the expected autumn onslaught, with testing and intensive care unit staffing still critically short. In Rome last week, people waited in line for eight to 10 hours to get tested, while front-line medics from Kyiv to Paris found themselves again pulling long, short-staffed shifts in overcrowded wards.
“When the state of alarm was abandoned, it was time to invest in prevention, but that hasn’t been done,” said Margarita del Val, viral immunology expert with the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center, part of Spain’s top research body, CSIC.
“We are in the fall wave without having resolved the summer wave,” she told an online forum last week.
Tensions are rising in cities where new restrictions have been reimposed, with hundreds of Romanian hospitality workers protesting last week after Bucharest
again shut down the capital’s indoor restaurants, theaters and dance venues.
“We were closed for six months, the restaurants didn’t work and yet the number of cases still rose,” said Moaghin Marius Ciprian, owner of the popular Grivita Pub nGrill, who took part in the protest. “I’m not a specialist, but I’m not stupid either. But from my point of view it’s not us that have the responsibility for this pandemic.”
As infections rise inmany European countries, some
— including Belgium, the Netherlands, theU.K., Spain and France— are diagnosing more new cases every day per capita than the U.S., according to the seven-day rolling averages of data kept by Johns Hopkins University. On Friday, France, with a population of about 70 million, reported a record 20,300 new infections.
Experts say Europe’s high infection rate is largely a result of expanded testing that is turning up far more asymptomatic positives than during the first wave, when only the sick could get a test.
But the trend is nevertheless alarming, given that the flu season hasn’t even begun, schools are open for inperson learning and cold weather hasn’t yet driven Europeans indoors, where infection can spread more easily.
“We’re seeing 98,000 cases reported in the last 24 hours. That’s a newregional record. That’s very alarming,” said Robb Butler, executive director of the World Health Organization’s European regional office. While part of that is a result of increased testing, “it’s also worrisome in terms of virus resurgence.”
There is somegood news, however. Dr. Luis Izquierdo, assistant director of emergencies at the Severo Ochoa Hospital in Madrid, said that at least now, doctors know what therapies work. During the peak of the epidemic in March and April, doctors in hardest-hit Spain and Italy threw every drug they could think of at patients — hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir, ritonavir — with limited success.
“Now we hardly use those drugs, as they hardly have any effect,” he said. “So in this sense, we have had a victory because we know so much more now.”
But treating the virus medically is only half the battle. Public health officials noware dealingwith a surge in anti-mask protests, virus negationists and residents who are simply sick and tired of being told to keep their distance and refrain from hugging their loved ones.
The WHO last week shifted gears from giving medical advice to combat infections to giving psychological advice on how to nudge virus-weary Europeans to keep up their guard amid “COVID fatigue” sweeping the continent.
“Fatigue is absolutely natural. It’s to be expected where we have these prolonged crises or emergencies,” theWHO’s Butler said.
The WHO last week put out new advice for governments to consider more social, psychological and emotional factorswhendeciding on lockdowns, closures or other restrictions — a nod to some in the field who say the mental health toll of lockdowns isworse than the virus itself.
That data, Butler said, “is going to become more important because we have to understand what restrictions we can put in place that will be sustained and adhered to, and acceptable to our populations.”