Lesson not learned: Europe unprepared as second coronavirus wave hits

Europe's second wave of coronavirus infections has struck well before flu season even started, with intensive care wards filling up again and bars shutting down.

Making matters worse, authorities say, is a widespread case of “Covid-fatigue”.

Record high daily infections in several eastern European countries and sharp rebounds in the hard-hit west have made clear that Europe never really crushed the Covid-19 curve as hoped, after springtime lockdowns.

Spain this week declared a state of emergency for Madrid amid increasing tensions between local and national authorities over virus containment measures.

Germany offered up soldiers to help with contact tracing in newly flaring hotspots.

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Italy mandated masks outdoors and warned that for the first time since the country became the European epicentre of the pandemic, the health system was facing “significant critical issues” as hospitals fill up.

The Czech Republic's “Farewell Covid” party in June, when thousands of Prague residents dined outdoors at a 500-metre (yard) long table across the Charles Bridge to celebrate their victory over the virus, seems painfully naive now that the country has the highest per-capita infection rate on the continent, at 398 per 100,000 residents.

“I have to say clearly that the situation is not good," the Czech interior minister, Jan Hamacek, acknowledged this week.

Epidemiologists and residents alike are pointing the finger at governments for having failed to seize on the summertime lull in cases to prepare adequately for the expected autumn onslaught, with testing and ICU staffing still critically short.

In Rome this week, people waited in line for 8-10 hours to get tested, while front-line medics from Kiev to Paris found themselves once again pulling long, short-staffed shifts in overcrowded wards.

“When the state of alarm was abandoned, it was time to invest in prevention, but that hasn't been done,” lamented Margarita del Val, viral immunology expert with the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center, part of Spain's top research body, CSIC.

“We are in the fall wave without having resolved the summer wave,” she told an online forum this week.

Tensions are rising in cities where new restrictions have been re-imposed, with hundreds of Romanian hospitality workers protesting this week after Bucharest once again shut down the capital's indoor restaurants, theatres and dance venues.

As infections rise in many European countries, some — including Belgium, Netherlands, the UK, Spain and France — are diagnosing more new cases every day per capita than the United States, according to the seven-day rolling averages of data kept by Johns Hopkins University.

On Friday, France, with a population of about 70 million, reported a record 20,300 new infections.

Experts say Europe's high infection rate is due in large part to expanded testing that is turning up far more asymptomatic positives than during the first wave, when only the sick could get a test.

But the trend is nevertheless alarming, given the flu season hasn't even begun, schools are open for in-person learning and the cold weather hasn't yet driven Europeans indoors, where infection can spread more easily.

“We're seeing 98,000 cases reported in the last 24 hours. That's a new regional record. That's very alarming,” said Robb Butler, executive director of the WHO's Europe regional office. While part of that is due to increased testing, “It's also worrisome in terms of virus resurgence.”

It's also worrisome given many countries still lack the testing, tracing and treating capacity to deal with a second wave of pandemic when the first wave never really ended, said Dr Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“They should have been using the time to put in place really robust 'find, test, trace, isolate' support systems. Not everybody did,” McKee said. “Had they done that, then they could have identified outbreaks as they were emerging and really gone for the sources.”

Even Italy is struggling, after it won international praise for having tamed the virus with a strict 10-week lockdown and instituted a careful, conservative reopening and aggressive screening and contact-tracing effort when summer vacation travellers created new clusters. Anesthesiologists have warned that without new restrictions, ICUs in Lazio around Rome and Campania around Naples could be saturated within a month.

The ICU alarm has already sounded in France, where Paris public hospital workers staged a protest this week to demand more government investment in staffing ICUs, which they said haven't significantly increased capacity even after France got slammed during the initial outbreak.

“We did not learn the lessons of the first wave,” Dr Gilles Pialoux, head of infectious diseases at the Tenon Hospital in Paris, told BFM television. “We are running after (the epidemic) instead of getting ahead of it.”

During the peak of the epidemic in March and April, doctors in hardest-hit Spain and Italy threw every drug they could think of at patients — hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir, ritonavir — with limited success.

But treating the virus medically is only half the battle. Public health officials are now dealing with a surge in anti-mask protests, virus negationists and residents who are simply sick and tired of being told to keep their distance and refrain from hugging their loved ones.