Public health officials across Europe are sounding the alarm over the resurgence of coronavirus cases as countries on the continent ease blockades and increase international travel, with some experts warning that citizens have become too accommodating.
The increase is marked in countries like Spain, while Eastern Europe and the Balkans, which were largely spared from the worst of the early pandemic, are experiencing a sharp increase in reported cases.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned of an impending “second wave” of COVID-19 across Europe on Tuesday, while the head of Germany’s public health authority said: “We have let our guard down.”
Some governments are already taking steps to curb the spread. Britain has imposed quarantine on people returning from Spain, while Germany and France have mandated mandatory testing for travelers from high-risk areas, including the United States.
Berlin is making the move as Germany, which thought it had successfully defeated COVID-19, is experiencing a worrying increase in infections. About 4,000 new cases were recorded last week.
Lothar Wieler, director of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s public health authority, said he was very concerned. “We don’t know if it’s the start of a second wave, but of course it could be.”
Authorities said the gradual lifting of restrictions on public life across the continent in recent months had led people to a false sense of security. Many no longer observe strict hygiene rules, wear masks in public, or maintain social distance.
The increased infection rates could be “strongly related to relaxation of the blockages,” said Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist. But the speed of the rebound in some parts of Europe has caught some experts by surprise.
“I thought we would see a break during the summer,” said Arnold S. Monto, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “I thought it would behave more like the flu than before, and I didn’t think we would see these increases.”
Spain is one of the most affected countries. Almost 14,000 new cases were registered in the week to July 26, with regional access points in Aragon, Catalonia and Navarra. The German Foreign Ministry advised on Tuesday against all non-essential travel to all three regions.
France, which reported 6,325 cases last week, is another country where the public is becoming less cautious. “The surprising thing is that, in recent weeks, the French have lost the notion of social distancing and caution,” Jean-François Delfraissy, the chief scientific adviser to the French government, said last week.
Appealing to the sense of civic duty of the people, he said: “[Our actions] it will determine if we have a manageable epidemic or if there are too many groups beyond control. “
Tourists are a particular concern. Officials are concerned that they are spreading the virus in crowded bars and nightclubs at resorts in countries like Spain and are passing it on to family and friends at home.
New restrictions are being introduced to cope with the increase in cases. Belgium moved on Monday to toughen social distancing and urge teleworking after a spike in the city of Antwerp, where the curfew was imposed.
“What I find alarming is that we are seeing more and more outbreaks within families, among groups of friends, and that seems to be related to people returning from high-risk areas,” Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister, said on Monday. .
Some experts see worrying parallels with the situation in February and March, when the coronavirus began to spread exponentially across Europe. “Suddenly, the numbers have increased, but in fact they have been growing slowly in the last month or two,” said Graham Medley, professor of infectious disease modeling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
“There is no particular trigger, it is just part of that exponential growth process.”
Rafael Bengoa, a former health minister in the Spanish Basque Country, attributed the new increase to outbreaks among seasonal farm workers, who live in overcrowded conditions and are often reluctant to be tracked.
Another factor was “the behavior of young people … in discos and bars”, not only in Spain but also in Great Britain and France. “That is creating a very negative situation,” he said. “They assume they won’t get infected.”
Germany has been praised for its success in containing the pandemic so far, but its crown has begun to slip. The number of new daily cases increased from about 500 in mid-July to 815 last Friday.
Previous surges were limited to specific locations, such as meat processing plants or nursing homes. But the latter are spread across the country. “We are seeing an increase in cases in many different communities,” said Ute Rexroth, chief of epidemiological surveillance at RKI. “It can be anywhere.”
Public health authorities have also expressed alarm at the large increase in infections in countries that withstood the first few months of the pandemic relatively unscathed. Serbia has seen a big rebound, with more than 400 new cases per day. She imposed a draconian blockade at the start of the pandemic, but relaxed it before last month’s national elections.
Romania is averaging around 1,000 new infections per day and recently overtook Poland to become the country with the highest number of confirmed cases in Central and Eastern Europe.
Some academics argue that the term “second wave” is more applicable to seasonal infectious diseases than COVID-19.
The notion, which has no scientific definition, derives from past outbreaks of influenza, especially in 1918 and 2009, when the disease almost disappeared in the summer and returned in the fall and winter, killing more people.
The researchers have been surprised by COVID-19’s poor response to seasonal variations in temperature and behavior. “I didn’t expect it to increase in the summer,” said Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia. A study from Japan found that the chances of contracting the disease indoors were 19 times greater than outdoors, he noted.
Mutations in the flu virus, some say, contributed to the second waves by increasing virulence and transmissibility. Although there have been some mutations in the COVID-19 virus, no material changes have been observed.
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