MESSAGE
| 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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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.
“We will be very challenged at least for the next 10 weeks, and this
will be the hardest phase of the pandemic,” Rudolf Anschober, Austria’s
health minister, said Sunday as he announced a toughening of his
country’s 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.
“We expected the government to be able to avoid further lockdowns. But
there was no real plan and we haven’t received enough financial help.
And it’s clear to us that the vaccine won’t cover the bulk of the
population before September,” 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.
“We need to stay open not to make money but to cover our costs. If we
don’t open now, we will be forced to shut down forever,” he said.
European authorities promised in late 2020 that mass vaccinations would
soon end the pandemic. But countries haven’t yet mounted large-scale
inoculation campaigns, with only a fraction of the European
population—many of them health-care workers—vaccinated 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.
“The EU bought far too few vaccines. They should have ordered at least
10 times as many, and the price for that—20 to 30 billion euros—would
have been negligible compared with the price of a continuous Europe-wide
lockdown,” said Karl Lauterbach, a German epidemiologist and legislator.
The Coronavirus Is Mutating. Here’s What We Know
0:00 / 6:21
3:55
The Coronavirus Is Mutating. Here’s What We Know
The Coronavirus Is Mutating. Here’s 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.
“This was a huge mistake. We now have the worst of the pandemic in front
of us in the next three months,” 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’t 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.
“We’ve 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,” said Andrea Crisanti, an infectious-disease expert
at the University of Padua in northern Italy. “The problem is the
fundamentally wrong approach of European and other Western countries.”
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.
“We have been mobilizing to ask to return to school, but in safety,”
said Ms. Cigliana, who helped organize socially distanced student
protests in recent weeks. “If we go back to school under the current
conditions, schools won’t be able to stay open.”
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-bleak-2021-11611065474?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1
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