People eat at a restaurant in central Rome, on Oct. 25, 2020.Cecilia Fabiano/The Associated Press
In Poland, the government is converting the country’s largest stadium into a temporary field hospital. In the Czech Republic, the army is setting up a 500-bed emergency hospital and has put out a call for ventilators. The lead ICU doctor in Liège, Belgium, says his hospital is already “overwhelmed.”
European governments are losing the battle against the COVID-19 resurgence that began two months ago and are seeing their hospitals fill up once again, a scenario that fills them with dread. To try to slow the admission rate into ICUs, many of them have implemented semi-lockdowns that are restricting mobility and putting enormous pressure on already struggling businesses.
“The latest epidemiological data cannot leave us indifferent,” Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said Sunday as he announced another round of tight restrictions. “The analysis indicates a rapid growth, with the stress on the national health system at worrying levels.”
Spare capacity in the ICUs in Campania, the southern Italian region that includes Naples, is so short that Governor Vincenzo De Luca is calling for a national lockdown. “We must block mobility between regions and municipalities while trying to defend productive activities as much as possible," he said late last week.
The mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, said his city had only 15 ICU beds left. Italy has more COVID-19 patients in intensive care – 1,208 at last count – than it had at the start of the two-month lockdown on March 9.
French health authorities said their ICU beds were already half-full across the country and two-thirds full in Paris. On Sunday, France recorded more than 52,000 new infections, a new record for the fourth day in a row.
Belgian health authorities are reporting 750 patients in ICU and said the country’s hospitals could reach the 2,000-patient maximum capacity within two weeks.
Even Germany, widely acknowledged to have Europe’s best test-and-trace systems, is coming under enormous pressure. Details of an internal meeting of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, which were leaked to the German press Monday, had her saying “the situation is threatening” and that “very, very difficult days lie ahead.”
Absent a vaccine, European governments have had no choice but to roll out a new array of restrictions aimed at reducing human mobility and contact. They fall short of the stay-at-home orders seen in the spring, when almost all European countries kept their citizens indoors, except for necessary trips such as supermarket and pharmacy runs.
Spain is under curfew from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., and the government has announced a two-week state of emergency that may be extended until the spring, suggesting it has only scant hope that the pandemic will disappear soon. France, which by Sunday had recorded 1.14 million infections, the second-highest in Europe, after Russia, has put about 46 million citizens – two-thirds of its population – under curfew orders.
Ireland is the outlier. Early last week it announced an almost total lockdown that will last six weeks. Most retail shops were closed.
Some Italian restaurant and bar owners are distraught over losing a substantial amount of their business. The 6 p.m. curfew will eliminate about half their revenues – Italians almost never eat dinner before 8 p.m. Over the weekend, there were anti-curfew protests in Milan, Rome and a few other cities.
In Rome, Claudio Olivetti, owner of La Villetta dal 1940, a reference to its opening year, said he felt the government was treating restaurant owners like “irresponsible terrorists … This time there is no justification for those who trample our sacred rights.”
The new restrictions are triggering growth forecast downgrades among European economists.
On Monday, economists at Dutch bank ING said “the second wave of the virus and new restrictive measures threaten to put the eurozone economy into reverse” after the third-quarter rebound.
Fresh economic numbers released Monday suggest that Germany is already on the downswing, even though its economy remains largely open. The new reading of the Ifo index, which measures business confidence, fell for the first time in six months. “In view of the rising infection numbers, German business is becoming increasingly worried,” said Clemens Fuest, president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich.
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