LISBON, Portugal (AP) – In the first week of December, the Prime Minister of Portugal gave his pandemic people an early Christmas present: restrictions on gatherings and travel due to COVID-19 would be lifted from 23 to 26 December so they could bring the holiday with family and friends through.
Shortly after these visits, the pandemic quickly got out of hand.
By January 6, Portugal’s number of new daily COVID-19 cases had risen by more than 10,000 for the first time. In mid-January, with alarm bells ringing new records of infections and deaths every day, the government closed for at least a month and a week later closed the country’s schools.
But it was too little, too late. Portugal had the most daily deaths and deaths per 100,000 people in the world in almost a week, according to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Outside the country’s overcrowded hospitals, long queues of ambulances wait hours to deliver their COVID-19 patients.
Portugal’s problems illustrate the risk of pandemic protection being abandoned if a new, rapidly spreading variant lurks unseen.
The spread of the pandemic across Europe is increasingly being driven by a particularly contagious virus mutation that was first spotted in south-east England last year, health experts say. The threat is leading governments to impose harsh new closures and curfew rules.
Viggo Andreasen, an assistant professor of mathematical epidemiology at Roskilde University, west of Copenhagen, said the new variant is a game changer.
“On the face of it, things may look good, but down below, the (new) variant is threatening,” he told The Associated Press. “Everyone in the business knows that a new game is on the way.”
In Denmark, the variant threatens to put the pandemic out of control, despite its relatively early success in limiting the spread of the virus. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said this month that “it is a race against time” to get people vaccinated and slow down the progress of the variant because it is already too wide to stop.
The National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands last week reported increasing cases of the variant and warned that it would increase the number of hospital admissions and deaths.
“There are essentially two separate COVID-19 epidemics: one epidemic with the ‘old’ variant, in which infections are declining, and another epidemic with the (new) variant, in which infections are increasing,” he said.
The Netherlands underwent a difficult five-week exclusion in mid-December and closed schools and non-essential businesses as new infections increased. Premier Mark Rutte extended the lockout on January 12 by another three weeks, citing concerns over the new variant.
Last week, the Dutch government went a step further and set a curfew from 21:00 to 04:30, limiting the number of guests people may have at home to one per day.
The discovery of the new variant has prompted other EU countries to step up their closure measures. Belgium has banned all unimportant travel for residents until March, and France could soon lock up for a third time 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.
The British variant is likely to become the dominant source of infection in the United States by March, experts say. It has been reported in more than 20 states so far.
The US government’s leading expert on infectious diseases, dr. Anthony Fauci, says scientists are preparing an upgrade for COVID-19 vaccines that will address the British and South African variants.
Moderna, the manufacturer of one of the two vaccines used in the US, says he is starting testing a possible booster dose against the South African version – a variant that Fauci said is “even more sinister” than the British.
Pfizer, which makes a similar COVID-19 vaccine, says the shot looks effective against the tensions from Britain, although there are still questions about the South African variant.
Amid fears, the United States is again imposing COVID-19 travel restrictions on non-US travelers from the UK, 26 other European countries and Brazil, adding South Africa to the list.
It was a steep learning curve for Portugal.
Ricardo Mexia, head of Portugal’s national association for public health doctors, said before easing restrictions at Christmas, the Portuguese government should have stepped up its preparations for January, but did not do so.
“The problem was not only to react quickly, but also not to be proactive” to get the problems ahead, he told AP. Authorities “need to be more assertive.”
In a report of 3 January by the Dr. Ricardo Jorge National Health Institute, which monitors the virus in Portugal, said tests found 16 cases of the new variant in mainland Portugal, 10 of which were among travelers at Lisbon airport. It did not specify where they came from.
Portuguese authorities struggled to make up for lost time, adding even stricter restrictions to the exclusion just three days after it was announced. But new cases and deaths 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 British strain could reach 60% in early February .
Only on Saturday did the government stop blaming the now devastating COVID-19 boom on the variant, stopping flights to and from the UK.
The World Health Organization’s emergency chief said earlier this month that the agency was assessing the impact of the new variant, but warned that it was also being used as a scapegoat.
“It’s just too easy to put the blame on the variant and say, ‘This is the virus that did it,'” he said. Michael Ryan told reporters in Geneva. “Well, alas, that’s also what we did not do.”
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AP authors Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Mike Corder in The Hague, The Netherlands, contributed to this report.