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BRUSSELS (REUTERS) – The Belgian government will meet on Friday (October 30) to decide on a possible new national blockade with the country that now suffers the highest rate of coronavirus infections per 100,000 citizens, according to official data.
The nation of 11 million people had 1,390 new Covid-19 infections per 100,000 residents in the past two weeks, data from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control showed Tuesday.
It is followed by the Czech Republic with 1,379 per 100,000, while many other European countries are reporting rising infection rates in a second wave of the global pandemic instigated by the onset of cold and wet winter weather.
Daily new infections in Belgium, where the European Union and NATO are based, peaked at more than 18,000 on October 20, nearly ten times the peak of a spring wave of the pandemic.
The number of patients in intensive care units (ICU) is doubling every eight days, to 809 as of Monday, with 5,260 people in hospitals, who are at risk of being left without beds.
Belgian Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes was still in intensive care in Brussels, after testing positive for Covid-19 last week.
In Liege, the Belgian city with the highest number of Covid-19 infections, hundreds of patients are admitted daily, its main hospital said in a Facebook post.
If the hospitalization rate continues at this rate, the hospital said it would crash “directly into a wall,” according to the Facebook post.
“The complicated thing is that we constantly have to open new units, start up new teams of nurses and doctors to care for these patients, and this flow of patients is ultimately continuous,” Christelle Meuris, infectious disease specialist who oversees a Covid unit -19 at the hospital, he told Reuters.
With 10,899 deaths in total, Belgium has one of the highest per capita Covid-19 death rates in the world.
The federal cabinet will meet on Friday to further toughen measures to curb the contagion of Covid-19, a week after tightening restrictions on social contacts by banning fans from sports matches and limiting numbers in cultural spaces. .
The government of the Wallonia region imposed a longer night curfew, while in the capital Brussels, all sports and cultural facilities were ordered to close on Saturday and residents were subjected to a longer curfew at starting Monday.
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