As COVID-19 sweeps Europe, rules tighten, protests erupt
Austria went into a major lockdown Monday to try to break the strong fourth wave of COVID-19 spreading across Europe, while the German health minister, Jens Spahn, warned that by the end of this winter “just about everyone in Germany will probably be either vaccinated, recovered or dead.”
“Immunity will be reached,” Spahn said at a Berlin news conference. “The question is whether it’s via vaccination or infection, and we empathetically recommend the path via vaccination.”
European governments are toughening their measures against COVID-19 in the face of soaring infection rates — more than 2 million new cases each week, the most since the pandemic began — and popular resistance, with violent protests over the weekend in numerous countries.
Tens of thousands of people protested official crackdowns and vaccine requirements in Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland and Croatia, with scattered violence and police use of tear gas and water cannons. Some protesters were organized by farright parties, but many were simply fed up with almost two years of intermittent state controls over their lives in the name of public health.
Ahmed Aboutaleb, mayor of Rotterdam, Netherlands, where some of the worst protests erupted, called them an “orgy of violence” and said football hooligans were believed to have been involved.
Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, defended the right to demonstrate. “But what I will never accept is that idiots use sheer violence against the people who work for you and me every day to keep this country safe under the guise of: ‘We are dissatisfied.’ ”
Europe is once again the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, accounting for more than half the world’s reported COVID-19 deaths this month, according to the World Health Organization. The four countries with the world’s highest rates of reported new cases in the past week are Austria and three that border it, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic; 27 of the top 29 are in Europe.
With vaccination rates lagging and winter approaching, more governments are ringing alarm bells.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told her Christian Democratic Party on Monday that the situation is “highly dramatic” and that the latest surge is worse than anything Germany had suffered so far.
In what may be her last month as chancellor, as a new government is being formed, she warned that hospitals would soon be overwhelmed unless the fourth wave of the virus is broken and called on Germany’s 16 states to enforce even tighter restrictions to block the spread.