LISBON, Portugal (AP) – In the first week of December, the Portuguese Prime Minister gave his pandemic-weary people an early Christmas present: restrictions on meetings and travel due to COVID-19 will be lifted from 23-26 December, so so that they can spend the holidays with family and friends.
Shortly after those visits, the pandemic quickly spiraled out of control.
By 6 January, the number of new cases of COVID-19 in Portugal exceeded 10,000 for the first time. In mid-January, with alarm bells ringing, as it brought new records of infections and deaths every day, the government ordered the closure of schools in the country for at least a month and a week later.
But it was too little, too late. Portugal has had the most daily cases and deaths per 100,000 people in the world for almost a week, according to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Outside the country’s overcrowded hospitals, long lines of ambulances are waiting for hours to deliver their patients with COVID-19.
Portugal’s problems illustrate the risk of disappointing pandemic guardians when a new, rapidly spreading version goes into hiding.
The spread of the pandemic in Europe is growing stronger due to a highly contagious viral mutation first detected last year in the south-east of England, health experts say. The threat is forcing governments to introduce new hard blockages and extinguishers.
Viggo Andreasen, an assistant professor of mathematical epidemiology at Roskilde University west of Copenhagen, said the new variant is a game changer.
“On the surface, things may look good, but underneath, the (new) version is approaching,” he told the Associated Press. “Everyone in business knows there’s a new game on the road.”
In Denmark, the variant threatens to keep the pandemic out of control, despite the relatively early success in containing the spread of the virus. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said this month “it’s a race against time” to vaccinate people and slow the progress of the variant, as it is already too widespread to stop.
The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands last week reported increasing cases of the variant and warned that the number of hospitalizations and deaths in hospitals would increase.
“There are essentially two separate COVID-19 epidemics: one epidemic involving the ‘old’ variant, in which infections are declining, and another epidemic involving the (new) variant, in which infections are increasing,” he said. this.
The Netherlands entered a five-week deadlock in mid-December, closing down non-essential schools and businesses as new infections grew. Prime Minister Mark Rutte extended the blockade by another three weeks on January 12, raising concerns about the new option.
Last week, the Dutch government took a step further and introduced a rule from 9pm to 4.30pm, as well as limiting the number of guests people can have at home to one a day.
The discovery of the new variant has led other EU countries to tighten their blocking measures. Belgium has banned all non-essential travel for residents until March, and France could soon start a third blockade if the 12-hour daily weather does not slow the spread of new infections.
Other mutated versions of the virus have emerged in Brazil and South Africa.
The British variant is likely to become the dominant source of infection in the United States by March, experts say. So far it has been reported in over 20 states.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the US government’s leading expert on infectious diseases, says scientists are preparing an upgrade for COVID-19 vaccines that will address British and South African variants.
Moderna, the manufacturer of one of the two vaccines used in the United States, says it is beginning to test a possible booster dose for the South African version – a variant that Fauci called “even more ominous” than the British.
Pfizer, which produces a similar COVID-19 vaccine, says the blow seems effective against the UK strain, although questions remain about the South African variant.
Against this background, the United States is re-establishing COVID-19 travel restrictions for non-US travelers from the United Kingdom, 26 other European countries and Brazil and adding South Africa to the list.
It was a steep learning curve for Portugal.
Ricardo Mexia, head of Portugal’s National Association of Public Health Doctors, said before the Christmas restrictions eased, the Portuguese government should have strengthened its preparations for January, but did not.
“The problem was not only not reacting promptly, but also not being proactive” to overcome the problems, he told AP. Authorities “need to be more assertive”.
A January 3 report by the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Ricardo Jorge, who monitors the virus in Portugal, said tests found 16 cases of the new variant in mainland Portugal, 10 of them on trips from Lisbon airport. He did not specify where they had come from.
The Portuguese authorities rushed to make up for lost time, adding even stricter restrictions to the blockade just three days after it was announced. But new cases and deaths have piled up.
Just over two weeks later, the virus monitoring agency estimated that there were cases of the new variant in Portugal in early December and warned that the proportion of COVID-19 cases attributed to the UK strain could reach 60% by early February.
It was not until Saturday that the government, blaming the now devastating increase in COVID-19, stopped flights to and from the United Kingdom.
The head of the World Health Organization in case of emergency said earlier this month that the agency is evaluating the impact of the new variants, but warned that they are also used as scapegoats.
“It’s too easy to blame the variant and say ‘the virus did it,'” Dr. Michael Ryan told reporters in Geneva. “Well, unfortunately, and what I didn’t do, he did.”
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AP writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Mike Corder in The Hague, the Netherlands, contributed to this report.