Europe sounds the alarm against wave of outbreaks

Countries beefing up COVID-19 measures amid violent protests

BRUSSELS — 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 at a Berlin news conference. “The question is whether it’s via vaccination or infection, and we empathetically recommend the path via vaccination.”

European governments are toughening 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 crackdowns and vaccine requirements in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands, with scattered violence and police use of tear gas and water cannons.

Some protests were organized by far-right parties, but many demonstrators said they were simply fed up with almost two years of intermittent state controls over their lives in the name of public health.

Ahmed Aboutaleb, the mayor of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, called some the protests an “orgy of violence.”

Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, defended the right to demonstrate, but what I will never accept is that idiots use sheer violence against the people who work for you and me every day to keep this country safe under the guise of: ‘We are dissatisfied.’ ”

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.

With vaccination rates lagging and winter approaching, more governments are ringing alarm bells.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told her Christian Democratic Party on Monday that the situation is “highly dramatic” and that the latest surge is worse than anything Germany had suffered so far.

In what may be her last month as chancellor, as a new government is being formed, she warned that hospitals would soon be overwhelmed unless the fourth wave of the virus is broken and called on Germany’s 16 states to enforce even tighter restrictions to block the spread.

Germany, like many European countries, is at the same time pressing for citizens to get booster shots.

But it faces a dwindling supply of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, which was partly developed in the country.

While the European Medicines Agency is poised to approve the vaccine for use on children ages 5 to 11 this week, first doses for children are not scheduled to be delivered to European Union countries until Dec. 20, Spahn said.

Neighboring Austria on Monday began its fourth lockdown, one of the few in Western Europe since vaccines became available.

Most stores, restaurants, sporting venues and cultural institutions shut, leaving the streets cold and quiet in the weeks before Christmas.

The lockdown, which only allows people to leave home to go to work or to procure groceries or medicines, will last at least 10 days and as many as 20 and comes after months of struggling attempts to halt the contagion through widespread testing and partial restrictions.

Austria has also announced that vaccination will be compulsory as of Feb. 1 — the first Western country to take that step and one of only a handful around the world.

Alexander Schallenberg, Austria’s chancellor, said he had initially opposed compulsory vaccination, but “we have too many political forces, flimsy vaccine skeptics and spreaders of fake news in this country.”

On Saturday, some 40,000 Austrians marched in Vienna to protest the new COVID-19measures.

The WHO chief for Europe, Hans Kluge, earlier this month blamed the region’s woes on insufficient vaccination despite the availability of vaccines and said that the continent could see a half-million more deaths by February.

“We must change our tactics, from reacting to surges of COVID-19 to preventing them from happening in the first place,” he said.

LAETITIA VANCON/THE NEW YORK TIMES The streets of Salzburg were mostly deserted Monday after Austria began its fourth virus lockdown. The lockdown will last at least 10 days.