Some European nations plan to loosen restrictions
BERLIN — Austria is allowing small shops to resume business after Easter. Denmark is reopening nurseries and primary schools. The Czech Republic is planning to lift a travel ban.
Gingerly, and with plenty of caveats, some corners of Europe are tiptoeing toward a loosening of the strict lockdown measures that have been in place for close to a month to slow the spread of the coronavirus, idling economies and leaving citizens in an uneasy limbo of social isolation.
But even as the number of new infections appears to be plateauing in several European countries, the message from leaders is clear: The next phase is not a return to normality. It is learning how to live with the pandemic — possibly for quite a long time.
Wearing a face mask and speaking behind plexiglass, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria illustrated what that new normal might look like when he announced “a stepbystep resurrection” of the economy this week.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark was more explicit.
“It’s like walking a tightrope,” she said. “If we stand still, we may fall. If we go too fast, it may soon go wrong. We don’t know when we’ll be on firm ground again.”
This week’s announcements came as China lifted its lockdown of the city of Wuhan on Wednesday, a powerful symbolic victory for the country and for a world battling a virus that first emerged there.
European governments are eager to give their citizens a sense of hope and to reboot economic activity, too. But overshadowing that desire is the real risk of unleashing a second wave of mass infections and deaths.
How soon is too soon to allow the resumption of some activities — and which activities — is the overriding question.
While the number of deaths from the disease continues to accelerate in the United States, it has begun stabilizing in parts of Europe and even declined in hardhit countries like Italy. But the number of new daily infections in major countries like Germany, France and Britain, the three largest on the continent, may peak only after Easter.
Austria, Denmark and the Czech Republic, the three countries that have begun planning an exit from the lockdowns, are all smaller nations that moved early to shut down public life and perhaps as a result have been spared the worst of the fallout from the pandemic.