PARIS – In the early days of the epidemic, President Emmanuel Macron advised the French to fight a “war” against the coronavirus. Today, his message is “Learn how to live with the virus.”
From the full struggle of the Cold War, most people in France and the rest of Europe have chosen the option of coexistence as the infection grows, summer arrives in a risky autumn and the prospect of another wave haunts the continent.
Having given up hope of eradicating the virus or developing a vaccine in a matter of weeks, Europeans have largely returned to work and back to school, living a generally possible life amid a permanent epidemic that has already killed about 215,000 people in Europe.
This approach is in stark contrast to the United States, where controls for protection against the virus are politically divided and where many sectors have moved to reopen schools, shops and rest restaurants without a baseline protocol. The result is as few deaths in Europe as there are very few populations.
Europeans, for the most part, have begun to use the hard-won lessons of the early stages of the epidemic: the need to wear masks and practice social distance, the importance of testing and tracing, the crucial advantages of nimble and local responsiveness. All of these measures, strictly or as necessary, are aimed at preventing a national lockdown earlier this year that paralyzed the continent and the disabled economy.
“It is not possible to stop the virus,” said Emanuel Andre, a leading virologist in Belgium and a former spokesman for the government’s Covid-19 task force. “It’s about maintaining balance. And we have a few tools available to do that. “
He added, “People are fed up. They don’t want to go to war anymore. ”
Martial language has given way to more measured assurances.
“We are in a phase with the virus,” said Italian Health Minister Roberto Spirenza, the first European country to impose a national lockdown. In an interview with the La Stampa newspaper, Mr Spiranza said that “zero infection rates do not exist,” but that Italy was now more equipped to increase the risk of infection.
“There will be no other lockdown,” Mr Spiranza said.
However, the risk remains.
New infections have increased in recent weeks, especially in France and Spain. More than 10,000 cases were reported in France on the same day last week. This jump is not surprising because the total number of tests – now one million a week – has steadily increased and is more than 10 times what it was in the spring.
The death rate of about 30 people a day is a small fraction of what it was at the time when hundreds of deaths per day in France and sometimes more than 1000 deaths. That’s because infected people are now considered younger and health officials have learned how to better treat Covid-19, said William Dabe, an epidemiologist and former national health director of France.
“The virus is still spreading freely, we are poorly controlling the chain of infection, and inevitably high-risk people – the elderly, obese, diabetics – will be affected,” Mr Dab said.
In Germany, too, young people are increasingly being exposed to increasing cases of infection.
While German health authorities test more than a million people a week, the debate over the relevance of infection rates in providing epidemic snapshots has begun.
In early September, only a percentage of confirmed cases had to go to hospital for treatment, according to data from the country’s health authority. During the height of the epidemic in April, 22 percent of those infected ended up in hospital care.
Hendrik Streak, head of virology at the research hospital in Bonn, Germany, warned that the epidemic could be detected not only by infection statistics, but also by deaths and hospitalizations.
“We have reached a stage where the number of infections alone no longer makes sense.” Mr. Streak said.
The arrival of coronavirus in most of Europe was not prepared for the lack of masks, test kits and other basic equipment. Nations that came out better than others, like Germany, also reported more deaths than Asian countries near the source of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, but she reacted more quickly.
The national downfall helped control the epidemic in Europe. But after countries opened up and the rate of infection began to rise in the summer and people, especially young people, often began to socialize without following social-distance guidelines.
As the infection continues to rise, Europeans have returned to work and school this month, raising the risk of spreading the virus.
“We control infection chains better than in March or April when we were completely powerless,” said Mr Dabe, France’s former national health director. “The challenge for the government now is to find a balance between reviving the economy and protecting people’s health.”
“And it’s not an easy balance,” Mr. Dave added. “They want to reassure people so they can go back to work, but at the same time, we have to worry about them so that they respect the preventive measures.”
Among those measures, masks are now widely available throughout Europe, and governments, for the most part, agree on the need to wear them. Earlier this year, the French government frustrated people by wearing masks in the face of scarcity, saying they did not protect the wearers and could even be harmful.
Covering the face has become a part of the lives of Europeans, most of whom last March are still considered masked travelers from Asia, where the practice has been widespread for the past two decades.
Instead of implementing a national lockdown by paying less attention to regional differences, the authorities – even in a highly central nation like France – have begun to respond more quickly to local hot spots with specific measures.
On Monday, for example, Bordeaux officials announced that, in the face of an increase in infections, they would limit private gatherings to 10 people, ban visits to retirement homes and prohibit standing at bars.
In Germany, when the new school year begins with compulsory physical classes across the country, officials have warned that traditional events such as carnival or Christmas markets may have to be cut or canceled. Soccer games in the Bundesliga will be played without fans until at least the end of October-October.
In Britain, where wearing masks is not particularly widespread or strictly enforced, authorities have tightened rules on family gatherings in Birmingham, where the infection is on the rise. In Belgium, people are restricted to limiting their social activity to a bubble of six people.
In Italy, the government has sealed off villages, hospitals or even migration shelters to accommodate emerging clusters. Antonio Miglieta, an epidemiologist who conducted contact tracing in a quarantined building in Rome in June, said months of fighting the virus had helped officials break out before it got out of control, as they did in northern Italy this year.
“We got better than that,” he said.
Governments need to get even better at other things.
At the peak of the epidemic, even in France, like many European countries, there was such a shortage of test kits that many sick people could never be tested.
Today, France conducts one million tests a week, however, extensive testing has led to delays in appointments and results – up to a week in Paris. People can now test regardless of their symptoms or the history of their contacts, and authorities have not established priority tests that will speed up the results that are most risky for themselves and others.
“We may have a more targeted testing policy that may be more useful in fighting the virus than we are doing now,” said Lionel Berrand, president of the Union of Young Medical Biologists. The French government should ban people with prescriptions from participating in tests and targeted screening campaigns to combat the emergence of clusters.
Experts said French health officials should also make significant improvements in contact-finding efforts that proved crucial to the spread of the virus in Asian countries.
After its two-month lockdown ended in May, France’s social security system put in place a manual contact-tracing system to track infected people and their contacts. But the system, which relies heavily on the skills and experience of human contact tracers, has brought mixed results.
At the start of the campaign, each infected person gave the contact treasurer an average of 2.4 other names, probably family members. The campaign continued to improve as the number of names rose to more than five in July, according to a recent report by French health officials.
But since then, the average figure has slowly dropped to less than three contacts per person, while the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19, meanwhile, has increased tenfold, to about 800 new cases a day from a seven-day average – New York Times According to figures compiled by, the current average is about 8,000 per day.
At the height of the epidemic, most people in France were very critical of the government’s handling of the epidemic. But the poll shows that the majority now believes the government will likely handle the second wave better than the first.
“This is a good sign that most people are now wearing masks,” said Jerome Carrier, a police officer who visited Paris from his home in Metz, in northern France.
“Initially, like all French people, we were shocked and worried,” said Mr Carrier, 55, of the family’s two eldest friends, Kovid-19, who died. “And then, we adjusted and went back to our normal lives.”
The report was contributed by Constant Méhut and Antonella Francini of Paris, Matt Apuzo of Brussels, Gaia Pianigini and Emma Bubola of Rome, and Christopher F. Sutze of Berlin.
