The first tests after Christmas show an escalation of infections in several EU countries as restrictions tighten
If there is a general consensus on something, be it in Brussels, Beijing, Montevideo or Washington, it is that the coronavirus is now transmitted at a speed “never seen before” and has generated a pandemic within the pandemic, although fortunately less lethal compared to the that the world has been dragging since the beginning of 2020 thanks to vaccines. The rapid spread of the omicron variant is shaking the planet. When it was hoped to tame the epidemic with the patience of the blacksmith striking in the forge, the strain discovered in South Africa has created a new, super-accelerated viral horizon that looms governments, health systems and transport operators with uncertainty and the need to recover. restrictions closer to the rigor of 2020 than to the relaxation of recent months.
In the United States, one of the main concerns on Tuesday was to ease airport congestion, with tens of thousands of people stranded in terminals waiting to return home after the Christmas holidays. The drop in links after the disastrous weekend, in which 10,000 connections were canceled around the planet due to the damage that the virus causes on crews, has continued in the US with 1,400 services suspended on Monday, another 800 on Tuesday and An important sector of the flight personnel outraged, since they reject the decision of the US authorities to reduce the quarantine from ten to five days in the case of those vaccinated who have been infected and are asymptomatic. “We fear that it is a measure adopted by pressure from companies more than for scientific reasons,” a spokesman for the group told the ‘Washington Post’ on Tuesday.
A few data on cross-border mobility are enough to perceive the new “rules of the game” that experts consider inherent to ómicron: without leaving Europe, this week the number of governments that reduce space for international travel will increase by establishing that the negative PCR it is no longer enough and that, in addition, any passenger must demonstrate that they have been vaccinated with the full schedule. It is not about a border closure – the EU does not endorse it, but it is moving towards a more severe filter.
Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Austria have joined this system. Non-vaccinated foreigners will be prohibited from entering even if they carry a negative PCR. Only those under the age of 16, essential service workers and, in some cases, cross-border employees, as well as diplomatic personnel are excluded. The Finnish Parliament also approved this Tuesday mandatory vaccination for the entire nursing sector.
The World Health Organization offers a very accurate portrait of omicron nesting in the world, which is encouraging EU governments to tighten restrictions. Developing countries constitute one of the fundamental havens of the covid due to the low level of immunization. But the other key piece is Europe. The new mutation is spreading in an unbridled way through this territory, which has registered 2.9 million new cases in just one week; an unprecedented escalation that prompts the WHO to launch the alert for Europe to hurriedly look for a way to stop the epidemic. Statistics are not to be taken lightly. It means that Europeans live at the global epicenter of the epidemic; 5.5 out of every ten infections occur on this continent, as does one in every two deaths (there have been 24,287 deaths in seven days). The United States follows.
The situation is bad, but it can get worse. The tests that are being carried out after the end of the Christmas festive cycle seem to support the pessimistic forecasts that scientists announced for weeks. More covid, more patients and more hospital saturation that, for example, in France, Italy and the Netherlands enters worrying levels.
The increase in family gatherings, parties and contacts between friends have again brought a vertical wall of infections. Thus, France this Tuesday threw no less than 179,807 infections in one day, when the maximum so far had been reached on Saturday, with 104,000 patients. The United Kingdom counted, for its part, almost 130,000 without adding the positives from Scotland and Northern Ireland while Italy reported 78,313 infections and 202 deaths, 60 more than the previous day. Portugal also entered unusual figures with 17,172 infections and 19 deaths.
The Vaccine Lifesaver
Scientists suspect, however, that the worst may be yet to come due to the end of the year holidays and the infective power of the omicron variant itself, which, for example, increasingly sinks hitherto safe nations like China in the confinements and has displaced the delta strain in the Netherlands and in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, where it is predominant. Precisely, the Norwegian Public Health Institute has warned that the health situation is “more serious” and that within three weeks there are great possibilities that the country will go from a current average of 90,000 daily infections to 300,000. Also Denmark, Iceland and Greece have registered significant increases, with admission to hospitals that is already becoming a real problem throughout the old continent.
Faced with the denialist theses or that question the effectiveness of vaccines, experts consider precisely that the high rate of immunization has prevented omicron from devastating, collapsing ICUs and once again sowing European soil with coffins. Just one year after the start of the campaign, the EU countries have inoculated 1,100 million doses of the 9,000 injected throughout the world. In total, 4.52 billion people are protected, just over half of the world’s population.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the White House is also fighting to increase vaccination rates to contain a crisis that on Sunday left 215,000 new cases of coronavirus, 83% more than two weeks earlier. “Do not panic,” proclaims President Biden while in New York the mayor has ordered mandatory vaccination of merchants and private sector workers. In the Big Apple he worries how the delta and omicron strains are preying on children under the age of five years, the only ones below the vaccination age, accounting for half of hospital admissions.
In America, a country in favor of drastic measures is Bolivia. His government has threatened to impose up to ten years in prison for those who do not show the vaccination certificate to enter public facilities or attend social events starting on Saturday.
Germany limits New Year’s Eve to downward incidence
J. SERRA | Berlin
Germany does not trust its level of incidence, currently down, nor does it want an explosion of infections like those suffered by neighboring France or Denmark, under the dominance of omicron. The federal government and regional powers allowed Christmas to be celebrated without major restrictions, in a country where family gatherings are in a moderate format. But they did cut the New Year’s Eve celebrations, more prone to jugs and pitched pyrotechnic battles to welcome the year, to continue the party later.
Since this Tuesday, meetings of more than ten people, if all of them are vaccinated, or between members of a household and two more guests, if there are non-immunized among them. Those who could not present their covid passport had already closed access to non-essential shops, restaurants, cinemas, theaters or public swimming pools for weeks.
With the new restrictions, discotheques and cocktail bars are closed to everyone, immunized or not, with some exceptions in clubs under strict hygiene conditions.
The new restrictions will remain in place until at least January 7, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz and regional leaders meet again. By then the pandemic situation can be assessed. The incidence dropped to 215 cases per seven days and 100,000 inhabitants – it reached 480 at the end of November. But it is considered that the data will not be reliable until well into January, since during the holidays the data computation slows down.
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