Europe records highest ever weekly Covid cases, says WHO expert

Europe has recorded its highest ever weekly number of new Covid-19 cases, the World Health Organization has said, warning that without effective countermeasures daily death rates could reach four or five times their April peak within months.

Dr Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, said on Thursday the virus was spreading rapidly across the continent, with exponential increases being reported in daily cases and matching percentage rises in daily death rates.

“The evolving epidemiological situation in Europe raises great concern: daily cases are up, hospital admissions are up, and Covid is now the fifth leading cause of deaths” in the region, Kluge said, killing more than 1,000 people a day.

He said confirmed cases in the organisation’s 53 European member states had moved from 6 million to more than 7 million in just 10 days, with records being set on 9 and 10 October, when daily totals exceeded 120,000 cases for the first time.

However, there was cause for optimism, he said, because the situation was not the same as during the first wave of the pandemic.

“We are recording two to three times more cases per day compared to April, but five times fewer deaths, and hospital admissions are taking two to three times longer to double,” he said.

“The pandemic today is not the pandemic yesterday – not only in terms of its transmission dynamic, but in the ways we are now equipped to face it.”

An increase in testing was partly responsible for the rise in daily cases, while greater transmission among younger, less vulnerable people plus hospitals’ improved ability to manage severe cases was helping to lower the mortality rate.

Nonetheless, he warned, there was plainly “a realistic potential” for the epidemic to worsen drastically if the disease spread back into older and more vulnerable age groups “as a result of more intense social contacts between generations”.

Models suggested that if governments loosen restrictions for any length of time, daily death rates could hit five times their previous highs by January next year, Kluge said. But they also showed that simple measures could dramatically slow the trend.

“The systematic and generalised wearing of masks, at a 95% rate rather than the 60% rate today, together with strict controls on social gatherings in public or private spaces, could save up to 281,000 lives by 1 February,” he said.

Tighter restrictions announced by several European countries, from the Netherlands to Spain and France to the Czech Republic, were “good because absolutely necessary”, Kluge said.

“They are appropriate and necessary responses to what the data is telling us: transmission and sources of contamination occur in homes and indoor public places, and within communities complying poorly with self-protection measures,” he said.

Any future full-scale lockdowns should carefully consider the risks and collateral damage to communities, he warned. “In March, lockdown was a shutdown, where every corner of our society and economy was halted,” he said.

“It was the default option because we were caught off-guard. Today it means a step-by-step escalation of proportionate, targeted and time limited measures.”