ROME — Customers in the bookshop in Rome paid no attention to the round stickers on the floor instructing them to eradicate Covid by keeping “at least 1 meter away”.
“These are things of the past,” said Silvia Giuliano, 45, who was not wearing a mask as she flipped through paperbacks. She described the red plates, with their spiky coronavirus spheres crossed out, as artifacts “like bricks from the Berlin Wall”.
Across Europe, faded stickers, signs and billboards stand as ghostly remnants of past battles against Covid. But while the remnants of the pandemic’s deadliest days are everywhere, so is the virus.
A common refrain heard across Europe is that everyone has Covid as the BA.5 Omicron sub variant fuels an explosion of cases across the continent. However, governments are failing to act, even in the previously strictest countries, largely because they see no significant rise in severe cases, overcrowded intensive care units, or waves of deaths. And Europeans have clearly concluded that they have to live with the virus.
Seats with faded blue social distancing signs urging riders of the Paris Metro to keep this spot clear are almost always taken. Crowds of unmasked Germans pass torn signs in shops and restaurants that read “Maskenpflicht” or mask requirement. In a building supplies store north of Madrid, the maskless cashier walks down the aisle before taking a seat behind a Plexiglas window. On a recent day at Caffè Sicilia in Noto, Sicily, the feet of three different people stood in a single “Keep Safe Distance” circle as they screamed for cannoli.
And many people are traveling again, both within Europe and beyond its borders, bringing much-needed tourist money to countries desperate to support their economies.
“This is how it is,” said Andrea Crisanti, a professor of microbiology who served as top advisor to Italian leaders during the coronavirus emergency. One silver lining, he said, was that summer infections would create more immunity for the traditionally more difficult winter months. But by circulating the virus at such massive levels, he said, he also created a “moral duty” on the part of governments to protect the elderly and otherwise vulnerable who were at risk of serious illness despite vaccination.
“We need to change our paradigm. I don’t think the measures aimed at reducing transmission have any future,” he said, listing reasons including social exhaustion with disabilities, greater risk acceptance, and the biology of a virus had become so contagious that ” there’s nothing that can stop it.”
That appears to be the case across Europe, where officials are taking comfort in the apparently low incidence of serious illness and death, although some experts are concerned about the toll of the vulnerable, the possibility that routine infection could lead to long-term Covid and the increased potential for mutations leading to more dangerous versions of the virus.
The “element of randomness” that generated the new mutations was “concerned,” said Christophe Fraser, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. Across Britain, Covid cases have tripled or more since late May, according to a survey conducted by the country’s Office of National Statistics.
“Infections show no signs of declining, with rates approaching levels last seen in March this year at the height of the Omicron BA.2 wave,” said Sarah Crofts, head of the statistical office’s analytical team. . The number of hospital admissions has more than quadrupled since May, according to government data. But the number of deaths from the virus, while increasing, did not come close to the level recorded at the beginning of the year.
“In general, we need to remain vigilant from a public health point of view, but this is no reason to change course,” said Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London.
There have been some shifts. In April, the European medicines regulator, the European Medicines Agency, advised that second booster injections would only be needed for people over 80, at least until there was “a resurgence of infections”. On July 11, it decided that moment had come and recommended second booster shots for everyone over 60 and all vulnerable people.
“This is how we protect ourselves, our loved ones and our vulnerable populations,” European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, Stella Kyriakides, said in a statement, adding: “There is no time to lose.”
Across Europe, authorities are trying to strike a balance between reassurance and complacency. In Germany, the Robert Koch Institute, the federal organization responsible for monitoring the virus, has said that “there is no evidence” that the BA.5 iteration of the virus is more deadly, but Health Minister Karl Lauterbach , shared tweets. posted by a hospital doctor in the German city of Darmstadt, who said his clinic’s Covid ward was fully occupied with severely symptomatic patients.
The German vaccine council has yet to update its advice on a fourth injection, which recommends a second booster alone for more than 70 and at-risk patients.
In France, where an average of 83,000 cases per day have been reported over the past week, Health Minister François Braun has steered clear of new restrictions. He told RTL radio last week that “we have decided to bet on the responsibility of the French”, while recommending wearing masks in crowded places and encouraging a second vaccine booster dose for the most vulnerable people.
He seemed confident that France, where nearly 80 percent of people have been fully vaccinated, and its hospitals could weather the new wave of infections and has focused more on collecting data to counter the virus. tracks. “Minimum but necessary measures” were the right approach, Mr Braun recently told the French parliament’s law committee. Last week, a proposal to give the government lasting powers to demand proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test upon entering France failed parliament.
In Spain, where the vaccination rate is above 85 percent and more than half of the eligible population has been boosted, the pandemic felt like an afterthought as Spaniards returned to their usual beach vacations and eagerly welcomed tourists. Officials, encouraged by the low occupancy of intensive care units, said monitoring the situation would be sufficient.
Not everyone was satisfied.
“We’ve forgotten practically everything,” said Rafael Vilasanjuan, director of Policy and Global Development at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, a research organization.
But other parts of Europe were even more hands-off. In the Czech Republic, where there are no restrictions at all, including in hospitals, the virus is rampant and officials openly predict an increasing spike in cases.
“The current wave is copying trends in other European countries a few weeks ahead of us and they have not seen a major impact on their health system,” said Deputy Health Minister Josef Pavlovic.
Bars, restaurants and cinemas were packed in Denmark, where cases have jumped 11 percent in the past two weeks, including hundreds of people at a music festival this month. “The numbers are positive – people are no longer getting seriously ill from the new variant,” Soren Brostrom, the director-general of the Danish health authority, said in a statement.
The Danish health authority expects a spread of infections in the autumn and plans to offer booster shots then.
In Italy, the first Western country to face the full force of the virus, reports of new cases have risen steadily since mid-June, though they have fallen in the past week. The average daily number of deaths has more than doubled in the past month, but hospitals have not been overrun. Health Minister Roberto Speranza announced that the country would follow the European regulator’s recommendation to offer a second Covid-19 booster shot to everyone over 60 – not just those over 80 and vulnerable patients.
“In the current situation, you have to have an integrated policy to protect the vulnerable people who, despite the vaccination, are still at risk of developing a serious, serious disease,” said Mr. Crisanti, the former adviser to Italian leaders on the virus, who complained about what he said was still a huge number of deaths each day from a contagious disease.
He predicted that over time, as frail older people died, deaths from the virus would decline and the virus would become increasingly endemic. He said the immune systems of people who live between 70 and 90 years old in the future would have memories of and protection against the virus.
At that point, the tattered signs of Europe’s struggle with Covid would truly belong to another era. But meanwhile, another woman in the Roman bookstore, this one wearing an N95 mask, was worried that the stickers under her feet would become relevant again.
“Reality,” she said, “goes faster than laws.”
Reporting contributed by: Constant Meheut from Paris, Gaia Pianigianic from Siena, Italy; Erika Solomon from Berlin; Cora Engelbrecht from London; Francheska Melendez from Madrid, Hana de Goeij from Prague and Jasmina Nielsen in Denmark.
