The second wave of coronavirus infections in Europe began just before the flu season, with intensive care wards being replenished and bars closed. Officials say making matters worse is a widespread case of “COVID-fatigue.”
Record high daily infections in many Eastern European countries and a sharp trend in the hard-hit West make it clear that Europe never really crushed the COW-19 turn as expected after the spring time lockout.
Spain declared a state of emergency for Madrid this week amid growing tensions between local and national officials over measures to control the virus. Germany sent troops to help trace contacts in new flare-up hotspots. Italy mandates masks outside and warns that for the first time since the country became a European epicenter of epidemics, the health system filling hospitals is facing “significant critical questions”.
The Czech Republic’s “Farewell Covid” party in June, when thousands of Prague residents ate out at a 500-meter (yard) long table around Charles Bridge to celebrate victory over the virus, now has the highest per capita infection rate on the continent, 100,000. 398 per inhabitant.
“I have to say clearly that the situation is not good.” The Czech Interior Minister, Jan Hamasek, acknowledged this week.
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Epidemiologists and residents alike are pointing fingers at governments that fail to adequately prepare for the expected autumn invasion in cases and fail to capture summer time losses, testing and ICU staff are still short-lived. In Rome this week, people waited in line for 10-10 hours for testing, while front-line Medicos from Kiev to Paris were once again seen shifting long, short-staffed shifts to a more crowded ward.
“When the alarm state was dropped, it was time to invest in prevention, but it was not done,” laments Margarita del Val, a viral immunologist with the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center, part of Spain’s top research institute, CSIC. Is. .
“We’re in the autumn wave without compromising the summer wave,” he told an online forum this week.
Hundreds of Romanian hospitality workers are protesting this week after Bucharest once again closed the capital’s indoor restaurants, theaters and dance venues.
“We have been closed for six months, rest restaurants are not working and yet the number of cases has increased,” said Mogin Marius Ciprian, owner of the popular Grivita Pub n Grill, which took part in the protest. “I’m not an expert but I’m not stupid either. But in my view we are not responsible for this epidemic.”
As infections increase in many European countries, some – including Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain and France – are diagnosing more new cases per capita per day than the United States, according to a seven-day rolling average held by Jones. Hopkins University. On Friday, 20,300 new infections were reported in France, with a population of about 70 million.
Experts say Europe’s high infection rate is a big part of an extended test that turns out to be much more asymptomatic positives than the first wave, when only illness can be tested.
But even though the trend is alarming, if the flu season has not even begun, schools are open to individual learning and Europeans are not driven indoors by the cold weather, where the infection spreads more easily.
“We’ve reported 98,000 cases in the last 24 hours,” said Rob Butler, executive director of the WHO’s Europe regional office. That’s a new regional record. That is very worrying. While part of that is due to increased testing, “it’s also worrying about the resurgence of the virus.”
London School of Hygiene and Tropical European Public Health Professor Dr. Martin McKee said it was also worrying that many countries lacked the ability to test, trace and treat the second wave of epidemics. Medicine.
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“They would have been using the time to put in really hard ‘Find, Test, Trace, Isolate’ support systems. Not everyone did,” Mc McKee said. “If they had done that, they would have exploded and they would have really gone for the source because they could have identified.”
Italy is also struggling, gaining international acclaim for curbing the virus with a 10-week strict lockdown and launching a precautionary, cash-strapped reopening and aggressive screening and contact-search effort as summer vacation travelers create new clusters. Anesthesiologists have warned that without new restrictions, the ICU in Lazio around Rome and Campania around Naples could be saturated in a month.
As it is, Campania has only V11 hospital beds, which are scheduled for COVID-1 for, and has already occupied 30,030 occupants, according to Campania’s Govt. Said Vincenzo de Luca. Half of Campania’s 100 ICU virus beds are now in use.
For now, the situation is manageable. “But if we get 1000 infections a day and only treat 200 people, that’s a lockdown. Is it clean?” He warned this week.
The ICU alarm is already being heard in France, where staff at a public hospital in Paris protested this week to demand more government investments in staff at the ICU, saying capacity has not increased significantly even after criticism from France during the initial outbreak.
The head of infectious diseases at Tannon Hospital in Paris, Dr. “We didn’t learn the lessons of the first wave,” Giles Pialox told BFM television. “We (epidemics) run after it instead of moving forward.”
However, there is some good news. The Assistant Director of Emergency at Severo Ochoa Hospital in Madrid, Dr. “At least for now, doctors know what therapies do,” said Luis Ezequiel. At the peak of the epidemic in March and April, doctors in severely affected Spain and Italy were throwing out every drug they could think of with limited success on patients – hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir, rithonavir.
“Now we rarely use those drugs because they rarely have any effect.” “So in this sense we have won because we know a lot now.”
But treating the virus medically is only half the battle. Public health officials are now raising anti-mask demonstrations, virus negativists and residents who are told to keep their distance and avoid hugging their loved ones.
The WHO this week shifted gears to fight infection to provide psychological advice on how to deny Europeans fed up with the virus to keep their guard amid the “covid-fatigue” that has spread across the continent.
Butler of the WHO said, “Fatigue is quite natural. We are expected to have this long-term crisis or crisis wherever we are.”
The WHO this week gave new advice to governments to consider more social, mental and emotional factors when deciding on lockdowns, shutdowns or other sanctions – some in the sector say the mental health score of lockdowns is even worse than the virus. .
“This data is going to be more important because we need to understand what restrictions we can put in place that are sustainable and compliant, and acceptable to our population,” Butler said. “
