Europe: Sickened by a second viral wave
As Covid-19 cases rise across Europe, Spain is once again on the front lines of the pandemic, said Mónica García in El Diario (Spain). A strict threemonth lockdown suppressed one of the Continent’s worse coronavirus outbreaks earlier this year, but Spain is now recording some 10,000 cases a day. Whole neighborhoods in Madrid are back under lockdown. It didn’t have to be this way. New York City was hit as hard as the Spanish capital, but it has since kept its caseload low. The key difference is that New York reopened cautiously, while Madrid authorities did “everything possible to rush a full opening” without investing in testing and tracing. Now the city’s conservative government is blaming the uptick on the poor, whose crowded neighborhoods are virus hot spots, saying their “lifestyle” is spreading disease. The pandemic is stirring up class warfare, said Raquel Vidales in El País (Spain). A performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at Madrid’s Teatro Real was canceled last week after operagoers in the cheap balcony seats discovered they had to sit shoulder to shoulder, while those in the pricey orchestra seats were appropriately socially distanced. The booing from the gallery “was so loud that Italian conductor Nicola Luisotti left the theater.”
Even the Czech Republic, once Europe’s star in the fight against Covid-19, thanks to its early adoption of masks, is facing a terrifying autumn, said Martin Komarek in Denik (Czech Republic). We, too, reopened too soon. Now this nation of 11 million people is recording up to 3,100 positive cases daily— and experts warn that if we register 4,000 a day for a full month, “our health system will start to collapse.” That’s why indoor events are being banned and face masks, already needed to enter stores, will be required in schools. If we don’t “act vigorously and quickly,” we’ll look the way Italy did in the spring, with morgues overflowing and the entire country locked down.
That’s where Britain is heading, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer (U.K.). We’ve registered some 42,000 coronavirus deaths so far this year, Europe’s highest toll. Now, with new cases doubling every seven days, we could hit a staggering 50,000 cases a day by mid-October. Yet we are inexcusably short of tests, and even teachers and other essential workers exposed to Covid-19 are told “they will have to travel hundreds of miles to get a swab.” The government claims the current surge was unforeseeable. In fact, “it was both predictable and predicted,” the obvious result of policies “urging people to return to the office and bring bustle back to high streets.” The fault lies squarely with Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is “cavalier about detail and bored by complexity.” He likes to spout terms such as “moon shot” and “game changer” about the government’s Covid-19 plans. Yet his bold strategy to curb the current surge is telling pubs they have to close at 10 p.m. and banning gatherings of more than six people—unless it’s for a wedding, a museum tour, a grouse hunt, or another of the many exempt activities. Johnson’s fecklessness will cost more lives.