Critics say the new sanctions come too late and politicians eager to ease Europe’s existing problems could also be found.
“The second wave is not over, the emergency lockdown was also interrupted, so let people shop for Christmas,” Catherine Hill, a French epidemiologist, told CNN. He said the level of infection has remained high. “Intensive care units have recently gained admission [been increasing] Regularly, and now the situation is serious in some parts of the country, including large Paris. “
Alessandro Grimaldi, director of infectious diseases at Salvatore Hospital in the Italian city of L’Quilla, told CNN that the new “infectious” game had “changed the game” and added that “measures to prevent infection have to be tougher.”
The World Health Organization warned about this about two months ago, when it became clear that the UK variant was circulating in most of the UK. “Once it becomes effective, it will affect the overall epidemic curve and lead to the need for a more restrictive approach to where public health and social measures need to be in place to reduce transmission rates,” said a senior WHO emergency officer for Europe. Catherine Smallwood, said at the time.
It has happened now. The German Centers for Disease Control announced on March 10 that the UK variable has become an influential strain in Germany. France and Italy are also responsible for most of the new cases, according to health officials there. In Spain, B.1.1.7 is now under intense stress in 9 of the country’s 19 regions.
But there is another reason why U.S. experts are worried about what is happening in Europe right now.
But while the trends seemed promising, the number of cases was still much higher. That became a big problem when the new wave started – necessitating a new lockdown, Grimaldi said.
He said, “Lockdown is not easy, because it brings economic despair … the lifestyle that it brings changes.” “But they are inevitable to try to stop the virus.”
He said statistics from a recent study by the University of Bologna showed that Italy’s most stringent lockdown measures, known as “red zones”, were working – reducing covid-related numbers by 91%. Mortality.
Delaying the decision to impose a lockdown can be fatal. A British think tank called the Resolution Foundation said on Thursday that Kovid-19 had killed as many as 27,000 people as the government delayed launching the country’s latest lockdown until January, despite evidence of a rapidly growing case in December.
He observed that some European countries had “turned back to public health measures” after promising the Covid-19 number, which led to new growth.
Mike Tildesley, an infectious disease modeling specialist at the University of Wisconsin and a scientific adviser to the UK government, said the slow rollout of vaccines in many European countries meant they were at risk of seeing a large wave of new cases. “Unfortunately, in the event of a misdemeanor, unless nations come close to mob resistance, we are likely to see waves of infection as a cycle of countries between phases of infection.”
Grimaldi said vaccination plays a key role in fighting the epidemic, with safety measures at hand at the time, as the more the virus spreads in the population, the more likely it is to change. “The virus will try to survive despite being vaccinated, so lockdown is really the only way to stop the virus from circulating,” he said.
The World Health Organization warned on Thursday that Europe’s vaccination campaign is not yet slowing the transmission of the coronavirus. More than 1.2 million new infections were reported in the continent last week, and more than 20,000 people are dying of Covid-19 in a single week.
And the epidemic is “moving eastward,” Cluj added, adding that infection rates and deaths in Central Europe, the Balkans and the Baltic states are among the highest in the world.
A new report published in The Lancet Journal on Thursday showed that vaccination alone may not be enough to end the epidemic, and instead of resuming on a large scale, stressed the need to gradually ease sanctions.
Hill, a French epidemiologist, added that testing must also be a key part of the strategy. “In order to control the epidemic, to detect and isolate the carriers of the virus, large-scale testing of the population is needed,” he said, adding that about 50% of infections that do not know they are caused by Covid-19. .
The new wave of high case numbers is not limited to Europe. According to the latest WHO report, the number of cases globally has increased by 10 per cent in the last week and 30 million new cases have been reported.
The number of new cases peaked in early January, but fell for four consecutive weeks before rising in the past three weeks. The death toll is still falling and has dropped below 60,000 per week in the past week, the first time this has happened since early November.
Eliza McKintosh of CNN contributed to this report.
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