More than two years after the start of the pandemic, Europe is once again dealing with the advance of the coronavirus and an increase in hospitalizations due to the disease. The seventh wave of Covid, driven by the spread of subvariants of the omicron, raises the alarm for the risk of an explosion of cases in autumn and winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
The epicenter of infections at the beginning of the health crisis, the continent has returned to the spotlight: the most recent bulletin from the World Health Organization (WHO), on Thursday (22), showed that in the previous seven days, Europe concentrated 44% of the new cases in the world.
The situation, although less serious in relation to other moments, made the WHO warn of the possibility of what it called difficult months after the European summer, if the authorities do not take action now.
“Wait to act in the fall [a partir de setembro] It will be too late,” said regional director for Europe, Hans Kluge. The number of new infections has tripled in the last six weeks, and hospitalization rates have doubled in the same period.
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) indicated that 12 of the 27 European Union countries reported on July 10 an increase in hospital occupancy compared to the previous week, and that 23 registered an acceleration of cases in people aged 65 and over.
Although ICU admissions remain relatively low for now, 3,311 people died on the continent in a week, according to the WHO — a number far from the peak in January 2021, when, still without vaccine protection, 40,000 people lost their life in the same period.
Immunization rates are relatively satisfactory —according to the ECDC, in the EU 75.4% of the population has received at least one dose. But the pace of expansion of vaccine coverage stopped advancing at a desirable speed. More than a year after the start of the immunization campaigns, the rate of the second dose in the block is 72.8%, that of the first booster dose reaches 53% and that of the second is still at 5.1%.
Health officials do not expect the current wave to cause deaths at the levels of the first year of the pandemic, but experts express concern about the structure of health systems for a possible flood of new infected. The Netherlands, Hungary and Luxembourg are the EU countries with the highest percentage of new confirmed cases in a week (61%, 51% and 48% increase, respectively), and this advance is not limited to the bloc.
A joint editorial by two British medical journals highlighted concerns in the UK by pointing out that, in the last 50 years, so many areas of the healthcare sector have never been so close to “failing effectively”, foreshadowing what could turn out to be a collapse due to of discharge in Covid.
There were 9,000 hospital admissions due to the virus per week in the first six and a half months of this year; in 2021, the average was 6,000, and, in the first year of the pandemic, 7,000, indicated the editors of The BMJ and Health Service Journal, who also criticized the lack of energetic measures by the authorities.
“Unfortunately, the government is too preoccupied with solving its own political disasters to provide the public with the support they need,” says Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds. According to him, the country has queues at hospitals due to lack of staff, at the same time that funding for measures to combat Covid has been cut.
Among the new infections in Europe, the subvariants of the omicron BA.4 and BA.5 prevail — which exceed the mark of 90% of cases also in Brazil. Studies show that the strains, detected in South Africa in early 2022, are more contagious than the earlier BA.1 and BA.2.
Another aspect that has changed is the prevention measures. In recent months, European governments have discarded many of the tactics used to contain the virus, including mandatory mask use, mass testing, proof of vaccination and testing requirements for travellers.
The easing was authorized after the advance of vaccination and the drop in the number of deaths, but it had the pressure of the economic impacts of the lockdowns, aggravated this year by the War in Ukraine.
A March global survey by consultancy McKinsey pointed to geopolitical instability as the main concern for domestic economic growth, followed by inflation and energy price volatility — Covid, which topped the list, was only the eighth most cited reason.
Outside of Europe, other alerts are rising. In the US, from July 4th to 11th, 866,400 cases were registered, an increase of 17.2% over the previous week. The number is nearly four times the March average, yet it is far from the peak of 5.6 million seen in January. In the country, where vaccination coverage also advances more slowly, 67% of the inhabitants have completed their first cycle of immunization, and the average number of deaths is 414 per day.
At the other end, Africa is the continent with the lowest number of new confirmed cases in a week, even with the lowest vaccination rate — underreporting must also be considered. According to the WHO, 36.2 vaccines were administered on the continent for every 100 people, far from 171.2 in Europe and 188.15 in the Americas.
The increase in cases and hospitalizations in several regions is explained, in part, because the immune response of vaccines is lower against the new subvariants — the immunizers, however, remain effective.​
According to the president of the Sociedade de Infectologia do Distrito Federal, José David Urbaez, the picture suggests that Covid has not become seasonal and, with the emergence of variants, it is difficult to draw a long-term perspective. “The pandemic does not have the same magnitude as before, but we have no way of predicting the evolutionary phenomenon of the variants. Therefore, governments need to be much more prudent.”
