Europe: Back into lockdown as Covid cases rocket
The coronavirus is storming across Europe once again, said Jelmer Visser in InnovationOrigins.com (Netherlands). Covid case records are being “shattered almost on a daily basis” across Western and Eastern Europe, and hospitals in some cities are overflowing. The Netherlands reported some 23,600 new cases in one day last week—twice as many as at the peak of last winter’s surge—while in the Austrian state of Salzburg, fully 1.7 percent of the population tested positive in a single week. Austria has imposed a full lockdown after curbs on the unvaccinated failed to contain the Covid surge; new restrictions are on their way in Spain, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere; and protests are erupting all over the Continent, from Northern Ireland to Croatia. One anti-lockdown demonstration in the Netherlands turned into a riot, said Marcel van Lieshout in De Volkskrant (Netherlands). “Hooligans” hurled rocks, burned cars, and shot fireworks at police in Rotterdam, and officers responded with live ammunition, wounding three people. National police chief Henk van Essen warned of “radical undercurrents” among protesters and that demonstrations could get ever more violent. In neighboring Belgium, meanwhile, Brussels police blasted water cannons and tear gas at stone-throwing protesters infuriated by a new mask mandate and work-from-home orders.
Austria became the first European country to impose a general Covid vaccination mandate last week, said Vanessa Gaigg and Johannes Pucher in Der Standard (Austria), and the backlash was fierce. Shots won’t become mandatory until Feb. 1, but just before the country went back into lockdown this week, some 40,000 protesters chanting “Resistance!” took to the streets of Vienna. The demonstration was organized by the far-right Freedom Party, whose leader, Herbert Kickl— currently in isolation after testing positive for Covid—said the mandate meant Austria was now a “dictatorship.” Look, “no freedom-loving” society wants to bar citizens from public life if they’re not vaccinated, said Rainer Nowak in Die Presse (Austria). But a mandate is sadly necessary, because our government has failed to convince about 35 percent of the population that the Covid vaccines are safe. The pandemic has revealed just how many Austrians have “lost trust” in the government and politics—and that could be worse for society than the virus.
Such distrust is understandable in former Communist countries, said Jon Sharman in Independent.co.uk, where governments routinely lied to their people during the Cold War era. Former Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria and Romania have fully vaccinated only 24 percent and 31 percent of their populations, respectively. In Western European countries such as Germany and Italy, anti-vax belief appears to overlap with “support of right-wing or populist politics.” Fear of feeding those movements could explain why governments were reluctant to reimpose mask mandates and other restrictions until the current surge was well underway. Now it may be too late. The World Health Organization predicts that another 500,000 Europeans will die of Covid by February. It’s going to be a long, grim winter.