Coronavirus: Can Europe tame the pandemic’s next wave? - by Kai Kupferschmidt

We’re at risk of gambling away our success,” virologist Christian Drosten warned in the German newspaper Die Zeit last month. His message referred to Germany, but it could have been addressed to all of Europe. After beating back COVID-19 in the spring, most of Europe is seeing a resurgence. Spain is reporting close to 10,000 cases a day, more than it had at the height of the outbreak in the spring. France is back to reporting thousands of cases a day. In Germany, numbers are still low, but rising steadily. The pandemic is affecting countries that saw few cases in the spring, such as Greece and Malta, but is also rebounding in places that suffered terribly, including the cities of Madrid and Barcelona.

Few dispute that Europe rose to the initial challenge. In Bergamo, a hotspot in Italy’s Lombardy region, crematoria were so overburdened in March that army trucks had to transport the dead to other cities—but on 24 May, Lombardy registered zero COVID-19 deaths for the first time. By early July, the European Union and the United Kingdom together averaged fewer than 5000 new cases per day, whereas the United States and Brazil (which together have roughly the same population) had 50,000 and 40,000, respectively. Europeans enjoyed a surprisingly normal summer, with northern Europeans flocking to Mediterranean beaches.

The rising case numbers today aren’t quite comparable to the peak in April because countries are now testing far more people on a daily basis. But the increase shows that Europe relaxed measures too early and too much, says virologist Ab Osterhaus of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, Germany. “The wrong message was given, basically: We have done a great job and now we can relax again.” Instead, Europe could have tried to emulate New Zealand by stopping community transmission completely and zealously guarding against reintroductions, says Devi Sridhar, a global health expert at the University of Edinburgh who has been advising the Scottish government. Scotland committed early on to pushing case numbers down to zero, but other countries did not, and now almost all are seeing a resurgence

Read more at:
Can Europe tame the pandemic’s next wave? | Science | AAAS