Lesson not learned: Europeans unprepared as 2nd virus wave hits

ROME — Europe’s second wave of coronavirus infections has struck well before flu season even started, with intensive care wards filling up again and bars shutting down. Making matters 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 Europe never really crushed the COVID-19 curve as hoped after springtime lockdowns.

Spain last week declared a state of emergency for Madrid amid increasing tensions between local and national authorities over virus containment measures. Germany offered up soldiers to help with contact tracing in newly flaring hotspots. Italy mandated 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,” the Czech interior minister, Jan Hamacek, acknowledged last week.

Epidemiologists and residents alike 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 ICU staffing still critically short. In Rome last week, people waited in line for eight to ten hours to get tested, while front-line medics from Kyev to Paris found themselves once again pulling long, short-staffed shifts in overcrowded wards.

The ICU alarm has sounded in France, where Paris public hospital workers staged a protest last week to demand more government investment in staffing ICUs, which they said haven’t significantly increased capacity even after France got slammed during the initial outbreak.

“We did not learn the lessons of the first wave,” Dr. Gilles Pialoux, head of infectious diseases at the Tenon Hospital in Paris, told BFM television. “We are running after [the pandemic] instead of getting ahead of it.”