European authorities are faced with the dilemma of calibrating a response that meets urgent medical care requirements while appeasing a public increasingly fatigued by COVID-19 restrictions.
The second wave of coronavirus infections in Europe came long before flu season began, with intensive care rooms filling up again and bars closing. To make matters worse, authorities say, it is a widespread case of “COVID fatigue.”
In contrast, China, where the coronavirus was first detected late last year, has largely eradicated the virus domestically and is responding with an iron will against imported cases and rare cases of domestic transmission.
The most recent local group in the Asian country was detected in the industrial port city of Qingdao, and all 12 people tested positive for the virus over the past weekend, representing the first local transmissions from China in about two months. City officials took immediate action and in just four days, they tested more than 10 million people. On the 5th, the city official traced the origin of the cluster to two dockworkers and the cause of the spread was inadequate disinfection at the hospital where the duo went for treatment. Before the day was out, two senior health officials were suspended pending an investigation.
Rather, European authorities face the double dilemma of calibrating a response that meets urgent medical care requirements while appeasing a public increasingly fatigued by COVID-19 restrictions.
Is the second wave of Europe worse than the first?
Record daily infections in several Eastern European countries and strong rebounds in heavily affected Western Europe have made it clear that Europe never really crushed the COVID-19 curve as expected, after the spring locks.
According to an article in The conversation, the second wave is apparently worse than the first, as the level of infections is now higher than in March and April in many countries.
The article notes that new daily cases from France peaked at 7,500 on March 31. Its new peak was recorded on Sunday (October 10) with 26,675 new cases in the previous 24 hours. Similarly, the UK had a peak number of 7,860 daily cases on April 10, which has risen to a high of 17,540 on October 8 and is reported to be hovering around 20,000 throughout this week.
Another article in ABC News notes that the French hospital system is about to be overwhelmed and doctors are warning of a shortage of beds in hospitals in Paris as COVID-19 patients clog ICU wards.
According to the Spanish news newspaper The country, The country’s figures for this week include 60,000 new cases, while those for the previous week totaled 68,000.
Spain, according to The Associated Press, have confirmed more than 71,000 cases and more than 1,800 deaths from coronavirus, and recently more than 1,000 new cases were reported a day, reaching a record 3,105 on Friday.
Euronews It also notes that the vast majority of countries are reporting more cases each day now than during the first wave earlier this year. However, he argues that infection figures may appear higher simply because testing capacity has improved since the first wave hit these countries.
How did the situation get so bad?
Almost all the news reports covering the European response to the coronavirus agree that one of the main reasons for the massive increase in cases is due to a summer lull in which people let their guard down on the highly infectious pandemic.
Long after Europe appeared to have largely domesticated the virus that proved so deadly last spring, recently confirmed infections are reaching record levels in Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy and Poland. Most of the rest of the continent is seeing similar danger signs.
What is making matters worse is that governments failed to capitalize on the summer relief and raise public morale against the fight against the virus; the opportunity to increase hospital capacity was also not taken. Hasty behavior in the face of a receding pandemic may very well have caused the relapse.
The Czech Republic’s “Goodbye Covid” party in June, when thousands of Prague residents dined al fresco at a 500-meter-long table across the Charles Bridge to celebrate their victory over the virus, looks painfully naive now. that the country has the highest per capita rate. infection rate on the continent, 398 per 100,000 inhabitants.
“I have to clearly say that the situation is not good,” Czech Interior Minister Jan Hamacek acknowledged last week.
There were cases of Spaniards violating government guidelines in August, just after a three-month confinement ended, to celebrate the San Fermín bull run.
Similar reports surfaced in the UK in mid-September, where footage showed Londoners partying in the streets after the 10pm curfew imposed at the time.
Spain and Italy, which were hit hard in March and April, opened their doors to vacationers in July and August. The authorities in the Netherlands, for a long time, maintained that the masks only provided a false sense of security and actively discouraged the public from wearing them. Heading into the second wave, Prime Minister Mark Rutte had to turn 180 degrees and issue “strong advice” for people to wear masks in public places, while adding his government will consider making it a legal obligation. . The New York Times reported.
These separate cases do not address the root cause of a second outbreak, but they do point to how public apathy and prevention fatigue have led people to act rashly in the face of a global pandemic.
WHO Director for Europe, Dr. Hans Kluge, acknowledged that “it is easy and natural to feel listless and unmotivated, to experience fatigue.” “Although fatigue is measured in different ways and levels vary by country, it is now estimated to have reached more than 60 percent in some cases,” he added.
Can the Chinese response be a lesson to the rest of the world?
The situation in Europe contrasts with that in China, where authorities have managed to halt the outbreaks locally, even as the country was the first to report the deadly virus. Massive testing and full contact tracing, so far, seem to be the secret to their response mechanism.
Authorities did not repeat the drastic nationwide shutdown seen when the virus first spread from Wuhan earlier this year. Instead, they sealed off a limited number of residences and focused on massive testing, eventually examining entire cities where cases were reported from June onward.
“China has shown that it can mobilize the human resources and equipment necessary to get things done quickly and at scale … It is a combination of technological capacity and political will,” he added. Japan Times quoted Raina MacIntyre, a professor of global biosecurity at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
Since overcoming the first wave, Chinese authorities have focused on rapidly tracking and isolating all people who had potentially been exposed to the virus. AFP, The report on a previous similar outbreak in Beijing details the process adopted by the authorities.
“Volunteers went door-to-door throughout the city, asking residents if they had been in contact with people who may have been exposed to the virus. The tracking, however, took on a dystopian tone at times.”
The news agency reported that some residents were ordered to take virus tests after authorities used security camera footage from their car license plates to determine that they had been in close proximity to a suspected carrier.
For that reason and others, Beijing is unlikely to serve as a model for other countries facing their own second wave outbreaks.
“No one has the resources, the capabilities, the determination and the financial capacity, and of course the social capital, to do this except China,” said Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital in Singapore. AFP at the time.
Then, to quickly process millions of samples in one day, authorities have also relied on what they call batch testing.
“Chinese authorities can test so many people so quickly thanks to batch testing, a method that combines 10 samples at a time during testing. If any batch tests positive, all 10 people are quarantined and tested individually.” , informs CNN. However, another article on the news website quoted a Hong Kong virologist who raised several questions about this method.
Dr. Jin Dongyan, professor of virology at the University of Hong Kong, said CNN on Wednesday that the test was “a waste of resources” in many situations because Covid-19 patients are generally identified over a range of time and hidden cases cannot be identified all at once. “This is just a snapshot, so you will definitely miss a lot of positive people,” he said.
In addition to massive testing, Beijing is accelerating vaccine development.
The country is also giving its experimental vaccine to citizens which is still in the final stage of clinical trials and has not been approved. Students studying abroad, the high-risk population, and crown warriors are on the priority list to get the vaccine.
If the vaccine works, it could help protect students heading to Europe or the United States, where the pandemic still continues, medical experts said. But they said developers need to make it clear that it’s untested and keep track of what happens to the people who receive it.
If the vaccine doesn’t work, then “this is giving people a false sense of security,” said Sridhar Venkatapuram, a bioethicist at the Institute for Global Health at King’s College London.
Western universities “do not protect their students,” Venkatapuram said. “Basically, the company offers protection to its citizens when they leave China, which is essentially what any country would ideally do.”
The final stage of clinical trials, conducted in larger groups, is used to find rare side effects and study the effectiveness of a treatment. The first and second stage trials are designed to determine whether a vaccine or a treatment is safe.
With contributions from agencies
