Critics say the new restrictions have come too late and that Europe’s current problems can be attributed to politicians too eager to start easing.
“The second wave has not ended, the blockade was broken too early, to allow people to go shopping for Christmas,” French epidemiologist Catherine Hill told CNN. She said the levels of infection remained high. “Recently admission to intensive care units [been increasing] regularly, and the situation is now critical in various parts of the country, including greater Paris. “
Alessandro Grimaldi, director of infectious diseases at Hospital Salvatore in the Italian city of L’Aquila, told CNN that the new, more contagious variant “changed the game”, adding that “inevitably, the measures taken to prevent infection have to become more drastic.”
The World Health Organization warned of this almost two months ago, when it became clear that the United Kingdom variant was circulating in most of Europe. “Once it becomes dominant, it can impact the general epidemic curve and lead to the need for a more restrictive approach to the social and public health measures that need to be implemented so that transmission rates can decrease,” said the senior WHO emergency for Europe, Catherine Smallwood, said at the time.
This has now happened. Germany’s disease control center announced on March 10 that the UK variant had become the dominant strain in Germany. The new variant is also responsible for the majority of new cases in France and Italy, according to local health officials. In Spain, B.1.1.7 is now the dominant strain in nine of the country’s 19 regions.
But there is another reason why American experts are concerned with what is happening in Europe right now.
But while the trends looked promising, the case numbers were still very high. And that became a big problem when the new wave started – making the new blockages necessary, said Grimaldi.
“Blocking is not easy, because of the economic despair that it brings … the lifestyle change that it brings,” he said. “But they are indispensable for trying to stop the virus from stopping.”
He said data from a recent study by the University of Bologna showed that the most stringent blocking measures, called “red zones” in Italy, work – leading to a drop of up to 91% in the number of cases related to Covid deaths.
A delay in the decision to impose blockages can be deadly. The Resolution Foundation, a British think tank, said on Thursday that an additional 27,000 people died from Covid-19 because the government postponed the start of the country’s last blockade until January, despite evidence of the rapid increase in cases in December.
He noted that, after promising declines in Covid-19 numbers, some European countries “fell back on public health measures”, which led to further peaks.
Mike Tildesley, an infectious disease modeling expert at University Warwick and a scientific adviser to the UK government, said that the slower release of vaccines in many European countries means that they face a greater risk of seeing large waves of new cases. “Unfortunately, until nations come close to collective immunity, we are likely to see waves of infection occurring as countries alternate between the blocking phases,” he said.
Grimaldi said that although vaccination plays an important role in fighting the epidemic, it must be accompanied by security measures, because the more the virus circulates in the population, the greater the likelihood of suffering more mutations. “The virus will try to survive despite the vaccine, so blockages are really the only way to prevent the virus from circulating,” he said.
A new model published in The Lancet on Thursday showed that vaccinations alone may not be enough to contain the epidemic, emphasizing the need for a gradual easing of restrictions, rather than a big bang reopening.
Hill, the French epidemiologist, added that the tests must also remain a key part of the strategy. “To control the epidemic, massive tests on the population are needed to find and isolate those with the virus,” she said, pointing to an estimated 50% of infections caused by individuals who do not know they have Covid-19.
The new wave of higher case numbers is not limited to Europe. The number of cases increased 10% globally last week, to more than 3 million new reported cases, according to the latest WHO status report.
The number of new cases peaked in early January, but then declined for four consecutive weeks before increasing in the past three weeks. The number of people dying is still decreasing and dropped to less than 60,000 a week last week, the first time this has happened since the beginning of November.