How Europe’s fight against Covid-19 was provoked over the summer

The result: a second wave of infections across continents that is proving difficult to manage and risking that Europe will have to live with a high infection rate until next year.

“People assumed the situation was under control, but it was not,” said Rafael Bengoa, co-director of the Institute for Health and Strategy in Bilbao, Spain. “The fire was out, but the wrists weren’t.”

European countries are trying to strike a middle way, neither completely suppressing the virus or fully opening up their economies, experimenting with how to manage the epidemic without destroying civil liberties or livelihoods.

Most are now experimenting with local restrictions in hot spots of the virus. But public compliance with the Frames of the Rules of the Balance Act and the death toll will definitely be tested. Already some leaders are abandoning the strategy of light touch. The Irish government recently announced a six-week lockdown.

“It’s very difficult,” said Lawrence Friedman, a professor at King’s College London. “People talk in a way that has a clear policy to follow but is not there.”

The race to return to normalcy loved the virus. Universities across the continent welcomed students back, the UK government subsidized millions of restaurant meals to cater to people, newly opened borders saw tourists at Spanish nightclubs and beaches in France. With the virus out of sight, people’s behavior became milder.

Cell Ares, a researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology at Spain’s National Research Council, said officials preferred the economy over health, thinking nothing would happen during the summer.

Leaders today have little choice but to impose sanctions to slow the spread of the virus. A state of emergency has been declared in France and Spain. Paris is under night curfew and Madrid is locked down. People living in Wales are advised to get out of the house just for exercise. In Italy, even outside, face masks have been made mandatory. Although these restrictions are not yet as tight as the total closures seen earlier this year, they are likely to test the population’s morale in both economic growth and the winter months.

Overall, European countries are in a better position to control the epidemic than March. Testing capabilities have greatly expanded and hospitals are better able to treat patients. Europeans are now accustomed to social distance and wearing masks in public.

But even Italy, plagued by a shocking virus after the country’s north and which reopened more cautiously than its neighbors, has seen a sharp rise in cases.

Infection rates in Germany are also rising. Despite this being a robust testing system built on a world-renowned diagnostics industry, it helped prevent the spread of the virus during the summer.

Eric Jones, a professor of European studies and international political economics at Johns Hopkins University, said European governments have somehow reopened and hoped the vaccine or some other remedy would be available by autumn. In the European Union, the economy fell 11.8% in the second quarter of the year due to Covid-19. “You didn’t get invitations to many dinner parties if you predicted a three-year epidemic,” he said.

The European Union and the UK’s 27 countries reported an average of 259 new cases of coronavirus million over seven days as of Thursday, according to data from the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That compares to less than 10 at the start of May, when the Europeans were emerging from the lockdown.

An average of more than 27,000 new cases of coronavirus infection were reported in France during the seven days from Thursday. During the same period, a daily average of 19,500 was reported in the UK, around 15,000 in Spain, more than 12,000 in Italy and 7,800 in Germany.

Part of the explanation for the jump in the number of cases is extensive testing. But hospitalizations and deaths are also on the rise, a sign that the epidemic is getting worse. France and the UK reported an average of more than 150 Covid-19 deaths a day during the seven days from Thursday. Spain registered more than 150. The epidemic is less than 1,000 deaths a day reported in those countries during the spring peak, but the death toll has risen sharply since the summer.

Coronavirus needs social contact to move from host to host. As the economy reopened, summer tourism resumed and Europeans set out to visit bars and restaurants from the weekly lockdown – and finally returned to school and university – the spider chains of transmission lengthened and expanded. With the fall of summer the ability of the virus to spread was further encouraged and Europeans spent more time indoors in close proximity to others.

Some countries actively promoted people as a sign of normal life. In August, the British government subsidized more than 64 million restaurant meals to boost the country’s struggling service sector. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged Britain to return to work to set foot in town centers.

However, governments increased testing capacity, including slow turnaround times due to a lack of laboratory capacity, which remained serious problems, meaning that countries were struggling to conduct enough tests to match the outbreak standard. France, Spain, Britain and elsewhere, have not faced testing and trace systems.

Contact-finding applications also failed extensively. In France, less than 5% of the population downloads a government-created app. “It didn’t work,” French President Emmanuel Macron said last week. “I’ve asked our teams to redesign things.”

Government support for people with quarantine is pathogenic throughout Europe, which, according to disease experts, is a violation of quarantine guidelines.

“I’m sure some people didn’t say they were sick because they would have to stop working,” said Yazdan Yazdanpana, an infectious disease specialist at the Bichit Hospital in Paris and a member of the scientific panel advising the French government on Covid. 19.

One big difference during the second wave of the virus: public support for governments to control the epidemic is rife in many countries, and raises questions about how sustainable the latest round of sanctions will be.

“If you’ve found large sections of society who simply disagree with what they’ve been told to do, there’s a point where people stop going with it, or the level of resentment rises until policies become unstable,” Robert Dingwale said. Said Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham Trent.

Faced with this, governments are nervous about imposing a lockdown on a full-fledged basis, instead favoring an array of small steps, which they hope will prevent the spread. Britain introduced a three-tiered system of bans, spreading across northern England where the virus is spreading rapidly under very strict rules and keeping other areas relatively free. In the Italian city of Naples, local authorities ordered schools closed for two weeks starting Friday.

Disease experts acknowledge that nationwide lockdowns are down, if effective, tools, and if targeted measures are clearly delivered on purpose to the people and they can be implemented effectively.

Graham Medley, a professor of infectious-disease modeling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said living with the virus would be a trial and error.

– Matt Thej Dalton in Paris and Giovanni Legoreno in Rome contributed to this article.

Write to Max at Colchester at [email protected] and Jason Douglas at [email protected]