MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-10-25 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] European troubles with COVID-19
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How Europe’s Fight Against Covid-19 Went Awry Over the Summer
Max Colchester and Jason Douglas
10-12 minutes
In the battle against Covid-19, Europe is looking back at a summer of
squandered opportunities.
With the virus suppressed following months of intensive social
restrictions last spring, European leaders quickly moved to accelerate
the reopening of society to try to spur an economic recovery. But
pockets of infection persisted, and few countries had put in place
adequate systems to track and lock down local outbreaks. Making matters
worse, in several regions infection rates never fell to a level where
such systems could work effectively.
The result: A second wave of infections washing across the continent
that is proving difficult to manage and poses the risk that Europe will
have to live with high infection rates well into next year.
“People assumed the situation was under control but it wasn’t,” said
Rafael Bengoa, the co-director of the Institute for Health and Strategy
in Bilbao, Spain. “The fire was out but the embers weren’t.”
European nations are trying to strike a middle path, neither fully
repressing the virus nor fully opening up their economies, a vast
experiment in how to manage a pandemic without infringing too
extensively on civil liberties or destroying livelihoods.
Most are now experimenting with localized restrictions in virus hot
spots. But the balancing act is set to be sorely tested as public
compliance with rules frays and the death toll again climbs. Already
some leaders are abandoning the lighter-touch strategy. Ireland’s
government recently announced a six-week lockdown.
“It is just very difficult,” said Lawrence Freedman, a professor at
King’s College London. “People talk as if there is an obvious policy to
follow but there isn’t.”
The race to return to a form of normality fanned the virus. Across the
continent universities welcomed back students, the U.K. government
subsidized millions of restaurant meals to get people to eat out, newly
reopened borders saw tourists flock to night clubs in Spain and beaches
in France. With the virus out of sight, people’s behavior relaxed.
“Authorities prioritized the economy over health, thinking that during
the summer nothing would happen,” said Saúl Ares, researcher at the
National Center for Biotechnology of Spain’s National Research Council.
Today that has left leaders with little option but to reimpose
restrictions to slow the virus’s spread. A state of emergency has been
declared in France and Spain. Paris is under nightly curfew and Madrid
is locked down. People living in Wales are advised to leave the house
only for exercise. Face masks have been made compulsory in Italy, even
outdoors. Though these restrictions aren’t yet as stringent as the total
closures seen earlier this year, they are likely to both dent economic
growth and test the morale of populations in the winter months, experts say.
On the whole, European countries are in a better place to handle the
pandemic than in March. Testing capacity has vastly expanded and
hospitals are better able to treat the sick. Europeans are now
accustomed to social distancing and wearing masks in public.
But even Italy, traumatized after the north of the country was ravaged
early on by the virus and which moved more cautiously to reopen than its
neighbors, has begun to see a sharp rise in cases.
Germany’s infection rates have also begun to climb. That is despite a
robust testing system, built on a world-renowned diagnostics industry,
that helped stem the spread of the virus over the summer.
In some ways, European governments had no choice but to reopen and hope
that a vaccine or some other cure was available by the fall, said Erik
Jones, professor of European studies and international political economy
at Johns Hopkins University. In the European Union, the economy had
shrunk 11.8% in the second quarter of the year due to Covid-19. “You
didn’t get invited to a lot of dinner parties if you predicted a
three-year pandemic,” he said.
The 27 countries of the EU and the U.K. reported 280 new cases of
coronavirus per million on average for the seven days through Friday,
according to data from the European Center for Disease Prevention and
Control. That compares with fewer than 10 in early May, when Europeans
were emerging from lockdown.
France reported more than 29,000 new cases of coronavirus infection on
average over the seven days through Friday. Over the same period, the
U.K. recorded a daily average of 20,000 cases, Italy more than 13,000,
Spain more than 18,000, and Germany 8,800.
Part of the explanation for the jump in case numbers is widespread
testing. But hospitalizations and deaths are also on the rise, a sign
the pandemic is worsening. France reported an average of more than 170
Covid-19 deaths a day over the seven days through Friday, while Spain
and the U.K. reported more than 160. That is far fewer than the close to
1,000 deaths a day recorded in each of those countries during the
pandemic’s spring peak, but sharply up on the trickle of fatalities
observed during the summer.
The coronavirus needs social contact to jump from host to host. As
economies reopened, summer tourism resumed and Europeans emerged from
weeks of lockdown to visit bars and restaurants—and eventually to return
to school and university—the spidery chains of transmission lengthened
and proliferated. The virus’s ability to spread got an extra boost as
summer turned to fall and Europeans spent more time indoors in close
proximity to others.
Some countries actively encouraged people back to a semblance of normal
life. In August, the British government subsidized over 64 million
restaurant meals to prop up the country’s struggling service sector.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged Britons to return to work to
boost footfall in town centers.
Madrid emergency service technicians push a patient in a wheelchair to
the 12 de Octubre Hospital on Monday.
Photo: juan medina/Reuters
Although governments expanded testing capacity, critical problems
remained, including slow turnaround time due to a lack of laboratory
capacity, which meant countries struggled to perform enough tests to
match the scale of the outbreak. In France, Spain, Britain and
elsewhere, test-and-trace systems haven’t coped.
Contact-tracing apps also widely failed. In France, less than 5% of the
population downloaded a government-built app. “It hasn’t worked,” French
President Emmanuel Macron said last week. “I’ve asked our teams to
completely redesign things.”
Government support for those in quarantine is patchy across Europe,
which disease experts say may dent compliance with quarantine directives.
“I’m sure some people were not saying they were sick because they would
have to stop working,” said Yazdan Yazdanpanah, an infectious-disease
expert at Bichat Hospital in Paris and a member of the scientific panel
advising the French government on Covid-19.
As European countries cope with a second wave of infections, data
indicate that tourism has helped the coronavirus spread in popular
destinations and travelers’ home countries. WSJ explains how summer
travel has made it harder to control the pandemic. Photo: Damir
Sencar/Agence France Press
One major difference during the virus’s second wave: Public support for
governments’ handling of the pandemic is in many countries fraying,
raising questions about how sustainable the latest round of restrictions
will be.
“If you’ve got large sections of society who are just unconvinced by
what they’re being asked to do, there is a point at which people stop
going along with it, or the level of resentment builds until the
policies become unsustainable,” said Robert Dingwall, emeritus professor
of sociology at Nottingham Trent University.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Do you think a nightly curfew or a travel ban is more effective at
curbing the spread of Covid-19? Join the conversation below.
Faced with this, governments are nervous about imposing full-scale
lockdowns, favoring instead an array of smaller measures they hope will
stem the spread. Britain introduced a three-tier system of restrictions,
putting swaths of northern England where the virus is spreading fast
under the most onerous rules and leaving other areas relatively free. In
the Italian city of Naples, local authorities ordered schools to close
for two weeks starting Friday.
Disease experts acknowledge nationwide lockdowns are blunt, if
effective, tools and that targeted measures might work if their purpose
is clearly communicated to the public and they are implemented effectively.
“Living with this virus is going to be a process of trial and error,”
said Graham Medley, professor of infectious-disease modeling at the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
—Matthew Dalton in Paris and Giovanni Legorano in Rome contributed to
this article.
Write to Max Colchester at max.colchester-at-wsj.com and Jason Douglas at
jason.douglas-at-wsj.com
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