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The drastic step that no European politician wanted to take again is back on the agenda: the blockade.
French President Emmanuel Macron, whose government carefully avoided publicly discussing a national shutdown through a recent spike in coronavirus cases, relented on Friday, acknowledging that the country could be reverting to broader movement restrictions.
Like other leaders in the region, Macron is running out of options. As officials from Dublin to Prague grapple with the resurgence of the pandemic, their efforts to limit the spread of the virus with softer measures, from mandatory use of masks to partial curfews, are not working.
For Giuseppe Conte from Italy and Angela Merkel from Germany, the political stakes are high. While they were praised for how they handled the first wave, now criticism is mounting. People are fed up, divisions between local and national governments are growing, and if a prolonged lockdown is the only answer, they will be blamed for ruining economies.
The new wave of coronavirus looks different than the first. The number of cases appears much higher (France reported a record number of new infections on Sunday), but increased testing is detecting more cases. Meanwhile, the number of deaths, although much lower than in the spring, is increasing, as is the flow of patients requiring hospital care.
With health services gradually under pressure, one blunt tool remains: shutting down the economy and ordering people to stay home.
“Politicians have tough decisions to make,” Jean-Francois Delfraissy, the chief physician advising the French government on the pandemic, said in an interview on RTL radio on Monday. “This second wave will probably be worse than the first. It is spreading throughout Europe. “
As one blockade was already imposed on them in the spring, many Europeans strongly oppose a second blockade. Protesters in cities such as London, Naples and Berlin marched over the weekend against the pandemic “tyranny”. In Italy, some gyms and cinemas said they would not obey closure orders.
To make matters worse, even drastic measures will not bring immediate relief. Despite calls for a strict two-week shutdown in the UK, a look at data for the spring shows that it took approximately four weeks for the March 23 stay-at-home order to take effect.
In France, the number of hospitalized patients continued to rise for almost a month after a national lockdown was implemented on March 17. After that, it only slowly decreased.
“This is a dangerous time for many countries in the northern hemisphere,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, told a health conference on Sunday. “But time and time again, we’ve seen that taking the right actions quickly means that the outbreak can be managed.”
Some governments are willing to take tougher measures. Belgium is considering a blockade. Poland and the Czech Republic, the worst-hit country in Europe, said more restrictions could be nearby. Ireland shut down its economy for six weeks.
German Chancellor Merkel, who has recently called for greater urgency in the fight against the pandemic, held a meeting with state leaders to discuss next steps two days before Wednesday. The Bild newspaper reported that the country would adopt “light closure” restrictions that would affect restaurants, bars and events, but would keep most schools open.
In Spain, the central government announced plans to grant the country’s regions broad powers to declare closures, movement restrictions, and curfews. The measure aims to delegate some unpopular measures to local authorities and prevent a rollback against national edicts, as happened earlier in the year.
Stronger local action to stop the outbreaks at the source is a good idea, according to Azeem Majeed, professor of primary care and public health at Imperial College London.
“The government has not been willing to release budgets and responsibilities at the local level,” Majeed said. “They have preferred a more centralized model, which unfortunately does not work so well.”
Hospitals seem less prepared to cope, partly because surgeries that were suspended seven months ago cannot be delayed again, and partly because more doctors and nurses are getting sick than during the European spring.
Imminent measures
Merkel’s chief of staff said on Monday that 85% of German cases can no longer be traced to the source of the infection, meaning doctors have lost track of the chain of contamination.
The German chancellor, who has struggled to align state leaders, told a meeting of her party officials that new measures are imminent, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Europe’s largest economy was one of the most resilient nations in the first wave, but for the past week, the daily average is well above the spring peak.
Cases began to rise across Europe as temperatures dropped and the continent moved into fall. The SARS-CoV-2 virus survives longer in colder temperatures, increasing the risk of infection. Fatigue from social distancing may have played a role as well.
“We are shocked by the brutality of what has been happening for the last 10 or 15 days,” said Delfraissy from France.
In Poland, as in other European nations, officials managed to contain the spring wave thanks to a total lockdown, prompting the government to begin loosening restrictions.
Senior officials declared the virus “no longer a threat,” helping them mobilize older voters during a presidential vote in the summer, which the incumbent won by a small margin.
“As the number of infected Poles began to grow, people still believed that things were under control,” said Olgierd Annusewicz, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw. “That was the time when temporary hospitals should have been built, so we entered the second wave unprepared.”
