As COVID-19 recedes in the United States thanks to the accelerated vaccine rollout, cases and deaths related to the coronavirus are steadily increasing in former European hot spots.
In Italy, the continent’s first COVID-19 epicenter this time last year, coronavirus infections increased for the sixth consecutive week on March 7, the Italian Health Ministry said Tuesday in its weekly pandemic status report. Health Minister Roberto Speranza warned that the coming weeks in Italy “would not be at all easy,” in speaking with Italian news outlet La Repubblica last week.
The average number of cases in Italy has risen steadily since the week ending on Feb. 20, when about 12,100 cases were confirmed each day. On March 16, the average number of new cases over the previous seven days had ballooned to 22,525, according to New York Times data. Deaths in Italy have also climbed about 30% in the past two weeks.
About 54% of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Italy involved the highly transmissible variant discovered in the United Kingdom last fall.
Speranza ordered that seven regions be shifted into the toughest red zones, including Lombardy around the financial center Milan and Lazio near Rome, Italy’s capital. The lockdown restrictions resemble those imposed by the government last spring. Schools and nonessential shops were forced to close temporarily, and Italians will only be allowed to leave their homes for work or emergency health reasons starting on March 15. The lockdown will remain in place until at least April 6.
The whole country will be in lockdown over the Easter weekend, though it is unclear whether the majority-Catholic population will be able to attend church services.
In France, meanwhile, health authorities reported 29,975 new cases on March 16, a 4.5% increase from the total reported the previous Tuesday, the sharpest week-on-week rise in over a month. French Prime Minister Jean Castex cautioned that the country has entered “a kind of third wave” of infections driven by the coronavirus variants.
Recent case increases have already placed a strain on hospitals, particularly in Paris, where the troubling trend is especially apparent. The director general of the AP-HP Paris hospitals organization, Martin Hirsch, told Reuters on March 17 that the virus “is not under control,” adding that there are just as many patients in regional intensive care units “as there were at the peak of the second wave.” The overcrowding in Paris hospitals has gotten so extreme that the French government announced last weekend that it would transfer 100 patients to hospitals in other regions.
The French government has lifted most restrictions since it imposed a lockdown in November, but a nationwide nightly curfew remains in place, and some of the hardest-hit regions still endure weekend lockdowns. Now, the government is debating whether to reinstate a temporary lockdown in the Paris region.
The European Union’s vaccination rollout has hit hurdles caused by delivery delays as well as France and Italy’s decisions to halt vaccinations using the AstraZeneca shot, which has been linked to severe adverse effects in some recipients. The French and Italian governments have signaled that they are ready to resume vaccinations as soon as the European Medicines Agency advises that the shot is safe.
Vaccination rates in the U.S. have exceeded 2.4 million per day, with a total of about 72 million shots given, or roughly 22% of the population. About 39 million adults in the U.S. have been fully vaccinated. In France and Italy, meanwhile, each country has given roughly 8% of its population at least one dose of the vaccine.
The Biden administration expects to have more than enough vaccine supply to immunize every adult in the country by the end of May as the production of the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines ramp up. Before the AstraZeneca vaccine rollout in some EU countries was placed on hold, the drugmaker had warned that deliveries would fall short of what it was contracted to deliver. The total supply of the vaccine could be about 130 million by the end of June, significantly less than the 300 million doses it had pledged to provide the bloc by then.
