A year after Italy became the first European country to introduce a national shutdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the country has become terribly quiet again, with new restrictions imposed on Monday in an effort to third wave of infections threatening to stop sweeping across Europe and overwhelm its halting mass vaccination program.
While explaining the measures on Friday, Prime Minister Mario Draghi warned that Italy was facing a ‘new wave of infection’, driven by more contagious variants of the coronavirus.
As before, Italy was not alone.
“We have clear signs: the third wave in Germany has already begun,” Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute of Infectious Diseases, said during a news conference on Friday. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has predicted that this week will be the most difficult since the start of the pandemic in terms of allocating hospital beds and breathing machines, as well as nurses and doctors. Hospitalizations in France are at their highest levels since November, prompting authorities to consider a third national exclusion.
Across Europe, business is strong. Supply shortages and vaccine skepticism, as well as bureaucracy and logistical barriers, have slowed the rate of vaccinations. Governments lock up exhausted populations. Street protests become violent. A year after the virus started spreading in Europe, things feel terribly the same.
In Rome, the empty streets, closed schools, closed restaurants and canceled Easter holidays were a relief for some residents after months of infections, suffocating hospitals and deaths.
“It is a relief to return to the exclusion, because after all that has happened, people of all ages have been acting for months as if there was no problem,” said Annarita Santini, 57, on her bicycle. before driving the Trevi Fountain. , a popular site that had no visitors other than three police officers. “At least so,” she added, “the air can be cleared and people will be scared again.”
Italy relied for months on a color-coded system of restrictions that, in contrast to last year’s closure, attempted to surgically suffocate emerging outbreaks to keep a large part of the country open. It does not seem to have worked.
“History repeats itself,” Massimo Galli, one of Italy’s leading virologists, told the Corriere della Sera daily on Monday. “The third wave has started, and the variants are running.”
“Unfortunately, we have all had the illusion that the arrival of the vaccines will reduce the need for more drastic closures,” he said. “But the vaccines did not come in sufficient quantities.”