EUROPE FIGHTS COVID-19 WAVE — AND ITSELF
Austria went into a major lockdown Monday to try to break the strong fourth wave of COVID-19 spreading across Europe, while the German health minister, Jens Spahn, warned that by the end of this winter “just about everyone in Germany will probably be either vaccinated, recovered or dead.”
“Immunity will be reached,” Spahn said. “The question is whether it’s via vaccination or infection, and we explicitly recommend the path via vaccination.”
European governments are toughening their measures against COVID-19 in the face of soaring infection rates — more than 2 million new cases each week, the most since the pandemic began — and popular resistance, with violent protests over the weekend in numerous countries.
Tens of thousands of people protested official crackdowns and vaccine requirements in Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland and Croatia, with scattered violence and police use of tear gas and water cannons. Some protesters were organized by far-right parties, but many were simply fed up with almost two years of intermittent state controls over their lives.
Europe is once again the epicenter of the pandemic, accounting for more than half the world’s reported COVID-19 deaths this month, according to the World Health Organization. The four countries with the world’s highest rates of reported new cases in the past week are Austria and three that border it, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic; 27 of the top 29 are in Europe.
Germany, like many European countries, is pressing for citizens to get booster shots. But it faces a dwindling supply of the PfizerBioNTech coronavirus vaccine.
Austria on Monday began its fourth lockdown, one of the few in Western Europe since vaccines became widely available. Austria has also announced that vaccination will be compulsory as of Feb. 1 — the first Western country to take that step.