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DATE | 2021-01-19 |
FROM | Ruben Safir
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SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Everything is FINE with the economy - no rush
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From hangout-bounces-at-nylxs.com Tue Jan 19 19:12:58 2021 Return-Path: X-Original-To: archive-at-mrbrklyn.com Delivered-To: archive-at-mrbrklyn.com Received: from www2.mrbrklyn.com (www2.mrbrklyn.com [96.57.23.82]) by mrbrklyn.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 17676163FB3; Tue, 19 Jan 2021 19:12:58 -0500 (EST) X-Original-To: hangout-at-nylxs.com Delivered-To: hangout-at-nylxs.com Received: from [10.0.0.62] (www.mrbrklyn.com [96.57.23.83]) by mrbrklyn.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 89D68163FB3; Tue, 19 Jan 2021 19:12:54 -0500 (EST) To: "Wuhan(COVID)-19 Discussion and Medical Professionals" , hangout From: Ruben Safir Message-ID: <3534e56c-d8f4-100f-3b9d-ac1cbbe3f850-at-mrbrklyn.com> Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 19:11:55 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.6.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Language: en-US Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Everything is FINE with the economy - no rush --although Europe is teetering on disaster X-BeenThere: hangout-at-nylxs.com X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.30rc1 Precedence: list List-Id: NYLXS Tech Talk and Politics List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Errors-To: hangout-bounces-at-nylxs.com Sender: "Hangout"
Europe, Struggling to Exit the Pandemic, Faces Bleak 2021 Margherita Stancati in Rome and Bojan Pancevski in Berlin 7-9 minutes
Covid-19 infections and deaths remain stubbornly high across much of Europe while vaccination efforts are moving so slowly that widespread immunity is unlikely in the region before the fall, raising the prospect of a bleak 2021 for hundreds of millions of Europeans.
With between 3,000 and 4,000 people dying from the disease every day across the European Union in recent weeks, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, governments are prolonging and tightening antivirus measures such as curfews, remote learning and restaurant closures.
Fears are growing, too, of more contagious variants of the virus taking hold before governments can scale up their vaccination programs.
=93We will be very challenged at least for the next 10 weeks, and this will be the hardest phase of the pandemic,=94 Rudolf Anschober, Austria=92s health minister, said Sunday as he announced a toughening of his country=92s lockdown.
Germany is on Tuesday set to extend its lockdown, in force since November, while adding further measures, including pressing companies to allow most employees to work from home. Slovakia will allow commuting to work only with a negative coronavirus test. France has imposed a nationwide curfew of 6 p.m. Italians are barred from traveling outside their home region for at least another month.
The tightening restrictions are fueling frustration in many countries, and compliance is dwindling. Since Friday night, thousands of Italian restaurant and bar owners have kept their businesses open in defiance of the rules as a protest.
=93We expected the government to be able to avoid further lockdowns. But there was no real plan and we haven=92t received enough financial help. And it=92s clear to us that the vaccine won=92t cover the bulk of the population before September,=94 said Umberto Carriera, who owns several restaurants in the Italian city of Pesaro and is the chief organizer of the protest.
Many of the restaurants and bars that opened, including one owned by Mr. Carriera, have been fined and forced to shut down after police intervened. But the protest has continued.
=93We need to stay open not to make money but to cover our costs. If we don=92t open now, we will be forced to shut down forever,=94 he said.
European authorities promised in late 2020 that mass vaccinations would soon end the pandemic. But countries haven=92t yet mounted large-scale inoculation campaigns, with only a fraction of the European population=97many of them health-care workers=97vaccinated so far.
The EU executive, which its member countries tasked with purchasing vaccines for the whole bloc, mishandled the job of acquiring enough doses, critics say.
=93The EU bought far too few vaccines. They should have ordered at least 10 times as many, and the price for that=9720 to 30 billion euros=97would have been negligible compared with the price of a continuous Europe-wide lockdown,=94 said Karl Lauterbach, a German epidemiologist and legislator.
The Coronavirus Is Mutating. Here=92s What We Know
0:00 / 6:21
3:55
The Coronavirus Is Mutating. Here=92s What We Know
The Coronavirus Is Mutating. Here=92s What We Know As new coronavirus variants sweep across the world, scientists are racing to understand how dangerous they could be. WSJ explains. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ
The EU, with a population of around 450 million, had by late December ordered 300 million doses of the vaccine developed by BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc., the first to be authorized in Western countries. That amount, expected to be delivered sometime by the fall, is sufficient for 150 million people, since inoculation requires two doses.
The bloc is now negotiating the order of another 200 million doses, which would start to become available late this year.
=93This was a huge mistake. We now have the worst of the pandemic in front of us in the next three months,=94 said Prof. Lauterbach.
Covid-19 vaccines were administered at a hospital in Pisa, Italy, in December, as vaccination programs were rolled out across the continent. Photo: Enrico Mattia Del Punta/NurPhoto/Zuma Press
A spokesman for the European Commission said Monday the bloc had placed firm orders for nearly 1.5 billion doses in a diverse vaccination portfolio, with the option to order more if needed. But most of those are vaccines that haven=92t been approved yet.
The vaccination effort would be bolstered by the possible authorization on Jan. 29 of a shot developed by AstraZeneca PLC and the University of Oxford, with the bloc having preordered 300 million doses of it.
Some experts say the continent squandered an opportunity to suppress the virus when infection rates fell after springtime lockdowns. Europe could have pressed on with the strict restrictions many governments applied in the first wave of the pandemic, as many countries in East Asia did, instead aiming to live with the virus and avoid further economic damage.
=93We=92ve learned so little. After the first wave, nothing was done to prevent a second wave. And we are likely about to witness another surge, which is just crazy,=94 said Andrea Crisanti, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Padua in northern Italy. =93The problem is the fundamentally wrong approach of European and other Western countries.=94
Scientists say not enough was done to develop strong systems to test, trace and isolate virus carriers. Quarantine rules aimed at preventing travelers from spreading the virus, a cornerstone policy measure in Asia, have only become common in Europe this winter, albeit with varying enforcement.
Even Germany, whose pandemic management was once hailed as exemplary, is now registering record deaths from Covid-19, exceeding 1,400 a day. Uncontrolled transmission complicates vaccination campaigns because it increases the likelihood that a vaccine-resistant strain of the virus will emerge, scientists warn.
Meanwhile, Europeans are struggling to balance the risk of catching the virus with their desire to return to a semblance of normalcy.
Valeria Cigliana, a 17-year-old from Rome, returned to school on Monday for in-person lessons for the first time in months. While she hated remote learning and missed her classmates, she worries that too little has been done to avoid overcrowding in classrooms and on public transportation.
=93We have been mobilizing to ask to return to school, but in safety,=94 said Ms. Cigliana, who helped organize socially distanced student protests in recent weeks. =93If we go back to school under the current conditions, schools won=92t be able to stay open.=94
Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati-at-wsj.com and Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski-at-wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-struggling-to-exit-the-pandemic-faces-b= leak-2021-11611065474?mod=3Dlead_feature_below_a_pos1 -- =
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