LISBON, Portugal (AP) – In the first week of December, the Prime Minister of Portugal gave people tired of the pandemic a Christmas present: restrictions on meetings and travel due to COVID-19 would be removed from the 23 on December 26 so they could spend the holidays with family and friends.
Shortly after these visits, the pandemic quickly escaped his hands.
On January 6, the number of new daily cases of COVID-19 in Portugal exceeded 10,000 for the first time. In mid-January, with alarms that brought new records of infections and deaths every day, the government ordered a closure of at least a month and a week later to close schools in the country.
But it was too little, too late. According to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University, Portugal has had for almost a week the majority of daily cases and deaths per 100,000 people in the world.
Now out of the country’s overcrowded hospitals, long lines of ambulances wait hours to deliver their COVID-19 patients.
Portugal’s problems illustrate the risk of dropping guards against the pandemic when a new variant that spreads quickly hides unseen.
The spread of the pandemic in Europe is increasingly based on a particularly contagious virus mutation first detected last year in the south-east of England, health experts say. The threat is causing governments to introduce new blockades and curfews.
Viggo Andreasen, an assistant professor of mathematical epidemiology at Roskilde University in western Copenhagen, said the new variant changes the game.
“On the surface, things may look good, but underneath, the (new) variant is approaching,” he told The Associated Press. “Everyone in the company knows there’s a new game on the way.”
In Denmark, the variant threatens to bring the pandemic out of control, despite having a 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 because it is already too widespread to stop it.
Last week, the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands reported growing cases of the variant and warned it would increase the number of hospital admissions and deaths.
“There are basically two separate COVID-19 epidemics: one epidemic affecting the‘ old ’variant, in which infections are declining, and another epidemic including the (new) variant, in which infections are increasing,” he said.
The Netherlands went into a tough five-week shutdown in mid-December, closing non-essential schools and businesses as new infections increased. Prime Minister Mark Rutte extended the closure for another three weeks on January 12, citing concerns about the new variant.
Last week, the Dutch government took it a step further and introduced a curfew from 9pm to 4.30am, in addition to limiting the number of guests people can have at home to one per day.
The discovery of the new variant has prompted other EU countries to tighten their blockade measures. Belgium has banned all non-essential travel to residents until March and France may soon begin a third blockade if the 12-hour daily curfew does not delay the spread of new infections.
Other mutated versions of the virus have appeared in Brazil and South Africa.
According to experts, the British variant is likely to become the dominant source of infection in the United States in March. So far it has been reported in more than 20 states.
The U.S. government’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, says scientists are preparing an update 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 dose of booster against the South African version, a variant that Fauci said was “even worse” than the British.
Pfizer, which makes a similar vaccine against COVID-19, says its shot appears to be effective against the British strain, although questions remain about the South African variant.
Amid these fears, the United States is reinstating COVID-19 travel restrictions on non-US travelers from the UK, 26 other European countries and Brazil and adding South Africa to the list.
″ It has been a steep learning curve for Portugal.
Ricardo Mexia, head of the National Association of Public Health Physicians of Portugal, said that before easing restrictions for Christmas, the Portuguese government should have stepped up preparations for January, but did not.
“The problem has not only been not reacting quickly, but also not being proactive” to get ahead of the problems, he told AP. Authorities “need to be more assertive.”
A January 3 report from the National Institutes of Health by Dr. Ricardo Jorge, who controls the virus in Portugal, indicated that tests had found 16 cases of the new variant in mainland Portugal, 10 of them in travelers at Lisbon airport. He did not specify where they had come from.
Portuguese authorities struggled to make up for lost time, adding even tighter restrictions to the blockade just three days after it was announced. But new cases and deaths piled up.
Just over two weeks later, the virus control agency estimated that there had been cases of the new variant in Portugal in early December and warned that the proportion of COVID-19 cases attributed to the UK strain it could reach 60% in early February.
Only on Saturday did the government, blaming the devastating variant of the COVID-19 variant, stop flights to and from the UK.
The head of emergencies at the World Health Organization 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, ‘It was the virus that did it,’ ‘Dr. Michael Ryan told reporters in Geneva.” Well, unfortunately, it’s also what we didn’t do that we did. do”.
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AP writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Mike Corder in The Hague (Netherlands) contributed to this report.