COVID-19 cases rising in Western Europe

Santa won’t be getting his traditional welcome in the Dutch city of Utrecht this year. The ceremonial head of Carnival celebrations in Germany’s Cologne had to bow out because he tested positive for COVID19. And Austria is planning a lockdown on unvaccinated people in two hard-hit regions.

Nearly two years into a global health crisis that has killed more than 5 million people, infections again are sweeping across parts of Western Europe, a region with relatively high vaccination rates and good health care systems but where lockdown measures are largely a thing of the past.

The World Health Organization said coronavirus deaths rose by 10% in Europe in the past week, and an agency official declared last week that the continent was “back at the epicenter of the pandemic.”

Much of that is being driven by spiraling outbreaks in Russia and Eastern Europe — where vaccination rates tend to be low — but countries in the west such as Germany and Britain recorded some of the highest new case tolls in the world.

Although nations in Western Europe all have vaccination rates over 60% — and some, such as Portugal and Spain, are much higher — that still leaves a significant portion of their populations without protection.

Dr. Bharat Pankhania, a senior clinical lecturer at Exeter University College of Medicine and Health, says the large number of unvaccinated people combined with a widespread postlockdown resumption of socializing and a slight decline in immunity for people who got their shots months ago is driving the pace of infections.

The question now is if countries can tamp down this latest upswing without resorting to stringent shutdowns that devastated economies, disrupted education and weighed on mental health.

Public health experts say probably — but authorities can’t avoid all restrictions and must boost vaccination rates.

“I think the era of locking people up in their homes is over because we now have tools to control COVID — the testing, vaccines and therapeutics,” said Devi Sridhar, chief of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “So I hope people will do the things they have to do, like put on a mask.”