Europe grapples with Christmas, COVID-19

BRUSSELS – Please leave a chair empty at this year’s family Christmas dinner as a precaution, or face the possibility of having that chair empty forever.

That’s the stark situation Belgium’s prime minister has set to urge smaller festive family gatherings, as Europeans fight with containing the surging COVID-19 pandemic over the holiday season.

Alexander De Croo argued that the country’s long-running, costly efforts should not be thrown away for the sake of a few warm and fuzzy hours exchanging gifts under the Christmas tree. “I would not want the progress of the past four weeks to be wasted because of four days,” he told legislators last week.

Europe’s nations are struggling to reconcile cold medical advice with a tradition that calls for big gatherings in often poorly ventilated rooms, where people chat, shout and sing together — providing an ideal conduit for a virus that has killed more than 350,000 people in the continent so far. These weeks, it is the No. 1 cause of death in the European Union.

Yet the desire for contact with family is such that all the horrible realities can be briefly put on the sideline. In France, it took a letter addressed to Santa Claus to put it in perspective.

A year of pandemic and lockdown had weighed so much on a 22-year-old student, that he rekindled his youth and wrote again to the jolly children’s saint.

“For the end of this year, I’d simply like the family whose name I proudly bear to be reunited, and things to progressively return to normal,” wrote Alexis — Santa letters don’t usually involve a surname.

If families have not lost close ones to the pandemic, many have been unable to meet for much of the year when distancing had to do the job that, hopefully, vaccines will do in 2021. Often grandparents could not see their grandchildren, and family functions — even weddings or funerals — required minute planning and heart-wrenching choices on who would be excluded.

Hence the groundswell to hit the pause button, even for just a few days.

Britain, with the continent’s highest death rate yet a Christmas tradition unlike few others, could not temptation of relaxation.

People are barred from visiting other households in much of the U.K and there are travel limits to high-infection areas.

All that will go overboard for five days over the holidays, when up to three households can form a “Christmas bubble” and members can move freely between them. Cabinet Minister Michael Gove spoke of the need to “offer hope for families and friends who have made many sacrifices over this difficult year.”

Although the European Union has no direct say in national Christmas restrictions, EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, a former doctor, urged caution until vaccines become widely available.

“We must learn from the summer and not repeat the same mistakes,” she said. “Relaxing too fast and too much risks a third wave after Christmas.”

But even in her native Germany, led by Angela Merkel, social considerations will prevail: A restriction that limits private gatherings to five people from up to two households, not including children, will be allowed to double to 10 people over Christmas.

Karl Lauterbach, a lawmaker from Merkel’s coalition and epidemiology professor at the University of Cologne, said that “Christmas is of greater importance to people, therefore the planned easing of restrictions at Christmas is the right course.”

But many of Europe’s scientists disagree. Steven Van Gucht, a virologist with Belgium’s government health group Sciensano, said Friday that Germany’s Christmas rule is not about a reunion of 10 people.

“It is about hundreds of thousands, millions of meetings of 10 people,” he warned. “And the impact can be enormous.”

So what can be done? Some counterintuitive suggestions have emerged. Christmas dinner is possible — but with the core family in the dining room and grandparents in the kitchen, said Dr. Remi Salomon, from the Paris hospital authority.

“Don’t eat with them. If I give the virus to Grandma and Grandpa, that’s the worst thing of all. How would I live with that afterward?” he told France-Info network.

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