LISBON, Portugal (AP) – In the first week of December, the Prime Minister of Portugal gave his pandemic-weary people an early Christmas gift: restrictions on meetings and travel due to COVID-19 would be lifted from 23 to 26 December so they could spend the holiday season with family and friends.
Soon after these visits, the pandemic quickly got out of hand.
On January 6, the number of new daily cases of COVID-19 in Portugal exceeded 10,000 for the first time. In mid-January, with the alarm ringing new records of infections and deaths each day, the government ordered a blockade for at least a month and a week after the country’s schools were closed.
But it was too little, too late. Portugal has had the highest number of daily cases and deaths per 100,000 people in the world for almost a week, according to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Outside the country’s overcrowded hospitals now, long lines of ambulances wait for hours to deliver their COVID-19 patients.
Portugal’s problems illustrate the risk of leaving pandemic guards when a new, rapidly spreading variant is lurking.
The spread of the pandemic across Europe is increasingly fueled by an especially contagious virus mutation first detected last year in southeastern England, health experts say. The threat is driving governments to introduce new blockades and severe curfews.
Viggo Andreasen, assistant professor of mathematical epidemiology at Roskilde University, west of Copenhagen, said the new variant is a game changer.
“On the surface, things may look good, but deep down, the (new) variant is approaching,” he told the Associated Press. “Everyone in the business knows there is a new game on the way.”
In Denmark, the variant threatens to take the pandemic out of control, despite the relative initial success in containing the spread of the virus. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said this month that “it is a race against time” to vaccinate people and slow the variant’s progress because it is too widespread to be stopped.
The Dutch National Institute of Public Health and Environment reported last week the increase in cases of the variant and warned that the number of hospital admissions and deaths will increase.
“There are essentially two separate COVID-19 epidemics: an epidemic involving the ‘old’ variant, in which infections are decreasing, and another epidemic involving the (new) variant, in which infections are increasing,” said the document.
The Netherlands entered a difficult five-week block in mid-December, closing non-essential schools and businesses as new infections increased. Prime Minister Mark Rutte extended the blockade for another three weeks on January 12, citing concerns about the new variant.
Last week, the Dutch government took it a step further and introduced a curfew from 9 pm to 4:30 am, in addition to limiting the number of guests that people can have at home to one per day.
The discovery of the new variant has led other EU countries to tighten up their blocking measures. Belgium has banned all non-essential travel for residents until March, and France may soon begin a third block if the 12-hour daily curfew does not slow the spread of new infections.
Other mutant versions of the virus have emerged in Brazil and South Africa.
The British variant is likely to become the dominant source of infection in the United States in March, experts say. So far, it has been reported in more than 20 states.
The United States’ leading infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, says scientists are preparing an update for the COVID-19 vaccines that will address British and South African variants.
Moderna, maker of one of the two vaccines used in the United States, says it is starting to test a possible booster dose against the South African version – a variant that Fauci said was “even more harmful” than the British.
Pfizer, which makes a similar COVID-19 vaccine, says its injection looks effective against the British strain, although there are still doubts about the South African variant.
Amid these fears, the United States is restoring COVID-19 travel restrictions for non-American travelers from the UK, 26 other European countries and Brazil, and adding South Africa to the list.
It has been a steep learning curve for Portugal.
Ricardo Mexia, head of the National Association of Public Health Doctors in Portugal, said that before relaxing restrictions at Christmas, the Portuguese government should have stepped up preparations for January, but did not.
“The problem has been not only not to react promptly, but also not to be proactive” to anticipate the problems, he told the AP. The authorities “need to be more assertive”.
A January 3 report by the National Institute of Health Dr. Ricardo Jorge, which monitors the virus in Portugal, said the tests found 16 cases of the new variant in mainland Portugal, 10 of them in travelers from Lisbon airport. It did not specify where they came from.
Portuguese authorities struggled to make up for lost time, adding even stricter restrictions to the blockade just three days after its announcement. But new cases and deaths have accumulated.
Just over two weeks later, the virus monitoring agency estimated that there were cases of the new variant in Portugal in early December and warned that the proportion of COVID-19 cases attributed to the UK strain could reach 60% in the beginning of February.
Only on Saturday did the government, blaming the now devastating increase in the COVID-19 variant, halt flights to and from the United Kingdom.
The World Health Organization emergency chief said earlier this month that the agency is assessing the impact of the new variants, but warned that they are also being used as scapegoats.
“It’s very easy to blame the variant and say, ‘It was the virus that did it,'” Michael Ryan told reporters in Geneva. “Well, unfortunately, it was also what we didn’t do that did that.”
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AP writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Mike Corder in The Hague, The Netherlands contributed to this report.