Speedy virus variants power surge sweeping Europe
MILAN (AP) – The virus swept through a nursery school and an adjacent elementary school in the Milan suburb of Bollate with amazing speed. In a matter of just days, 45 children and 14 staff members had tested positive.
Genetic analysis confirmed what officials had already suspected: the highly contagious coronavirus variant first identified in England was racing through the community, a densely packed city of nearly 40,000 with a chemical plant and Pirelli bicycle tire factory that is a 15-minute drive from the heart of Milan.
“This is the demonstration that the virus has a sort of intelligence, even if it is a single-cell organism. We can put up all the barriers in the world and imagine that they work, but in the end, it adapts and penetrates them,” Bollate Mayor Francesco Vassallo lamented.
Bollate was the first city in Lombardy, the northern region that has been the epicenter in each of Italy’s three surges, to be sealed off from neighbors because of mutant versions that the World Health Organization (WHO) has said are now powering another uptick in infections across Europe.
The variants also include versions first identified in South Africa and Brazil.
Europe recorded one million new COVID-19 cases last week, an increase of nine percent from the previous week and a reversal that ended a six-week decline, the WHO said last Thursday.
“The spread of the variants is driving the increase, but not only,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, citing “also the opening of society, when it is not done in a safe and a controlled manner.”
The so-called United Kingdom variant is spreading significantly in 27 European countries monitored by the WHO and is dominant in at least 10 by the agency’s count: Britain, Denmark, Italy, Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Israel, Spain and
Portugal.
It is up to 50 percent more transmissible than the virus that surged last spring and again in the fall, making it more adept at thwarting measures that were previously effective, WHO experts warned.
“That is why health systems are struggling more now,” Kluge said. “It really is at a tipping point. We have to hold the fort and be very vigilant.”
In Lombardy, which bore the brunt of Italy’s spring surge, intensive care wards are again filling up as more than two-thirds of new positive tests are of the UK variant, health officials said this week.
After putting two provinces and some 50 towns on a modified lockdown, Lombardy’s regional governor announced tightened restrictions on Friday and closed classrooms for all age groups.
Cases in Milan schools alone surged 33 percent in a week, according to the head of the provincial health system.