Source::AP
LISBON, Portugal
Portugal’s problems illustrate the risk of letting down pandemic guards when a new, fast-spreading variant is lurking unseen. The pandemic’s spread across Europe is increasingly being powered by an especially contagious virus mutation first detected last year in southeast England, health experts say. The threat is prompting governments to introduce harsh new lockdowns and curfews.
Viggo Andreasen, an assistant professor in 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) variant is looming,” he told The Associated Press. “Everyone in the business knows that there is a new game on its way.”
In Denmark, the variant is threatening to spin the pandemic out of control, despite relative early success in containing the spread of the virus. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said this month “it is a race against time” to get people vaccinated and slow the variant’s progress because it is already too widespread to stop.
The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands last week reported rising cases of the variant and warned it will push higher the number of hospital admissions and deaths. By Jan. 6, Portugal’s number of new daily COVID-19 cases surged past 10,000 for the first time. In mid-January, with alarm bells ringing as each day brought new records of infections and deaths, the government ordered a lockdown for at least a month and a week later shut the country’s schools.
Just over two weeks later, the virus monitoring agency estimated 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 U.K. strain could reach 60% by early February. Only on Saturday did the government, blaming the now-devastating COVID-19 surge on the variant, stop flights to and from the United Kingdom.
The World Health Organization’s emergencies chief said earlier this month that the agency is assessing the impact of the new variants, but warned they are also being used as scapegoats.“It’s just too easy to lay the blame on the variant and say, ‘It’s the virus that did it,’” Dr. Michael Ryan told reporters in Geneva. “Well, unfortunately, it’s also what we didn’t do that did it.”
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