Omicron spreads global gloom over New Year’s celebrations
BRUSSELS » After struggling with the coronavirus for far too long, the world understands all too well Belgium’s word of the year, “knaldrang!” — the urge to party, the need to let loose. Yet as New Year celebrations approach, the omicron variant is casting more gloom.
Dire warnings abound, case loads are rising alarmingly fast, air traffic is snarled and several countries are considering more restrictions to add to the patchwork of lockdowns and other measures already in place around Europe.
New York City’s sweeping mandate requiring nearly all businesses, from multinational corporations to corner grocery stores, to ban unvaccinated employees from the workplace took effect Monday amid a spike in infections.
In Denmark, infection numbers have gone up drastically in the past few days and set a one-day record of over 16,000 in the nation of 5.8 million.
Travelers around the world faced flight cancellations and delays because of staffing shortages linked to COVID-19. FlightAware, a flight-tracking website, counted more than 2,400 cancellations worldwide by Monday afternoon, 884 of them within, into or out of the U.S.
It is the unpredictability of the virus that is keeping governments second-guessing and picking widely varying strategies to beat back the pandemic.
The French government and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson were assessing the latest data and the need to counter the record numbers of COVID-19 infections with more measures to keep people apart at a time when they so dearly want to be together.
But with indications that omicron might be a milder variant despite its extraordinary ability to infect people, politicians were caught in a bind over whether to spoil yet another party or play it safe to make sure health care systems don’t collapse.
France has recorded more than 100,000 infections in a single day for the first time in the pandemic, and COVID-19 hospitalizations have doubled over the past month. President Emmanuel Macron’s government scheduled emergency meetings Monday to discuss its next steps.
It is hoping that steppedup vaccinations will be enough. The government is pushing a draft law that would require people to be vaccinated to enter all restaurants and many public venues, instead of the current health-pass system that allows individuals to produce a negative test or proof of recovery if they are not vaccinated.
This piecemeal, often hesitant approach is visible through much of Europe. In Poland, a nation of 38 million where the daily death toll now often tops 500, now-closed nightclubs will be allowed to reopen on New Year’s Eve, with the government unwilling to go against the many voters opposed to restrictions and mandatory vaccinations.
And despite the highest death toll from COVID-19 in Europe, Russia will ring in the new year with little if any restrictions. Many precautions will be lifted during the holiday period that runs for 10 days starting New Year’s Eve. Russia also will not impose any additional travel restrictions.
The official Rosstat statistical agency estimated that between April 2020 and October 2021, Russia had 537,000 virus-related deaths.