Europe coronavirus deaths surge past 300,000
PARIS: A second coronavirus wave ploughed on relentlessly through Europe which reported more than 12 million cases and 300,000 deaths as swathes of Italy returned to lockdown and the British city of Liverpool trialled city-wide testing on Friday.
The continent has become the new epicentre of the pandemic and a total of 300,688 deaths have been reported in Europe since the Covid-19 virus first hit, according to an AFP tally of health authorities figures.
Two-thirds of these fatalities have been registered in the UK, Italy, France, Spain and Russia.
As countries raced to try and curb their spiking cases, they imposed new lockdowns despite signs of growing unrest, with several Italian regions shutting down and Greeks facing fresh stay-at-home orders from Saturday.
The US is also struggling to rein in the pandemic, recording over 1,200 deaths and more than 120,000 infections between Wednesday and Thursday evening in another daily record, according to the Johns Hopkins University.
In Italy, a lockdown was ordered for prosperous Lombardy, fellow northern regions Piedmont and Val d’Aosta, as well as one southern region, Calabria.
Giorgio Gori, the mayor of the northern city of Bergamo – the epicentre of Italy’s coronavirus crisis earlier this year – said “there is more tiredness and more distrust around” than during the first lockdown, after people protested outside his home.
The head of the infectious diseases department at Milan’s renowned Luigi Sacco hospital, Massimo Galli, told reporters he was “alarmed” by the situation and had been ever since the end of Italy’s first lockdown in May.
“I’ve always confirmed that you have to keep on high alert to avoid the return of problems,” Galli said.
“I’m sick of saying the same things, like the voice screaming in the desert without any acknowledgement.”
Governments are desperately trying to find alternatives to lockdowns which hammer at the economy.
Meanwhile, Greece’s second nationwide shutdown drew the ire of teachers as it closes down secondary schools and universities.
Theodoros Tsouchlos, president of the secondary school teachers’ union, said many high school students had already fallen behind during the first wave.
The second lockdown could raise inequalities further, as some students don’t have access to wifi or own a laptop, or else it is used by parents for teleworking, he added.
The coronavirus has also been mercilessly hitting Switzerland, and in particular its Frenchspeaking region where hospitals are rapidly becoming overwhelmed.
At one small hospital, patients with severe Covid-19 infections filled all 10 enclosed beds.
“This morning, I was asked to take one more patient... so I had to transfer the most stable patient I had to another hospital to make room,” Herve Zender, the chief physician at the LaChaux-de-Fonds’s ICU, told AFP.
The pandemic has killed at least 1,235,000 people since it first emerged in China late last year, out of more than 48.7 million confirmed infections. — AFP