Dutch patient flown to German facility
Northern Hemisphere faces ‘very tough’ spell
ALMERE, Netherlands — A bright yellow helicopter rose into a blue sky Friday carrying a COVID-19 patient from the Netherlands to a German intensive care unit, the first such international airlift since the pandemic first threatened to swamp Dutch hospitals in the spring.
The clatter of the helicopter’s rotors as it lifted off from a parking lot behind a hospital 20 miles east of Amsterdam was a noisy reminder of how the coronavirus is again gripping Europe and straining health care systems.
Elsewhere on the Continent, an absence of noise will underscore the virus’ resurgence. More than two-thirds of the people living in France were to be subject to a nightly curfew starting at midnight Friday, hours after health authorities announced that the country had joined Spain in surpassing 1 million confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic.
France became the second country in Western Europe and the seventh worldwide to reach that number of known infections after reporting 42,032 new daily cases. Of the 445,000 confirmed cases the World Health Organization had recorded in the past 24 hours, nearly half were in Europe, Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’S technical lead on COVID-19, said.
Experts say the real numbers of infections are probably much higher than the ones governments are reporting because of a lack of wide testing early on and the fact that some people don’t develop symptoms.
The head of the World Health Organization warned on Friday that countries in the Northern Hemisphere are at a “critical juncture” as the number of cases and deaths continues to rise.
“The next few months are going to be very tough, and some countries are on a dangerous track,” WHO Director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a media briefing from Geneva.
Curfews to rein in nightlife and other opportunities for the virus to spread are some of the increasingly drastic measures European nations are enforcing to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The 9 p.m.-6 a.m. curfew taking effect for at least six weeks in 38 regions of France comes on top of the imposition of the same restrictions in Paris and other French cities last week.
The extension means that 46 million of France’s 67 million people will be under curfews.
In Italy, where the governors of the three regions that include Rome, Milan and Naples declared overnight curfews early in the week, the capital moved to make “nightlife” hours even shorter for young people.
A 4½-hour nightly curfew is to come into effect Saturday night in the Greek capital, Athens, and the country’s second-largest city, Thessaloniki, as well as in several other areas deemed to have high infection rates.
In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez publicly appealed for the country to pull together to defeat the new coronavirus.
The Dutch airlift to a hospital in the German city of Muenster came amid soaring rates of infection in the Netherlands, where the seven-day rolling average of daily new cases has risen over the past two weeks from 24.58 new cases per 100,000 people on Oct. 7 to 47.74 new cases per 100,000 on Oct. 21.
Germany is now also in talks to take in people from the Czech Republic.