Europe’s painful second coronavirus wave may be starting to ease, a top World Health Organization official said Thursday, though its toll continues to be staggering, with someone on the continent dying every 17 seconds from the virus this past week.
The cautious assessment came after new diagnoses of the novel coronavirus slowed across Europe to 1.8 million cases, compared with 2 million the week before. Some of the worst-hit countries — including Belgium, France and the Czech Republic — have seen significant declines, while in Germany and elsewhere the curve is just beginning to bend. But hospitals remain packed, and deaths across the WHO’s 51-nation European region have been rising.
“There is good news and not so good news,” Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, said at a news conference, describing the drop in new diagnoses as “a small signal, but it’s a signal nevertheless.”
He attributed the decline to national lockdowns and other restrictions imposed across much of Europe this past month. But he urged nations not to lift restrictions too quickly, warning the small gains could vanish if they threw open doors as rapidly as they did in the summer.
“Too often we have seen the negative impact of easing too quickly following an understandable will from policymakers to free the public from periods of stringency,” he said. “Too often as well, we have also seen how much these short political gains are quickly offset by the devastating impact of having to reinstall mandates shortly after they are eased.”
Meanwhile, more than 29,000 people died of the virus in WHO’s 51-nation European region this past week, an 18 percent increase over the week before.
Global coronavirus infections may be six times higher than reported: Study
At a time when the world continues to reel under the coronavirus pandemic, researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Melbourne have found that the actual number of global coronavirus infections could be up to six times higher than the reported number of cases.
According to a modelling study, the researchers found the number of coronavirus infection rates between March 2020 and August 2020 across 15 countries were on average 6.2 times greater than reported cases.
The data was published in a journal named Royal Society Open Science, which shows coronavirus infection rates in the UK, France, Belgium and Italy are much higher than reported and in the case of Italy as high as up to 17-times.
According to the data, Australia had the best level of detection among the 15 countries by the end of April, but the rate of infection may still have been five times higher than what has been officially reported at the end of August, as reported by news agency PTI.
The study estimated the true number of infections across a combined population of over 800 million people in 11 European countries, as well as Australia, Canada, South Korea and the US, PTI quoted the researchers.
“We found Covid-19 infections are much higher than confirmed cases across many countries, and this has important implications for both control and the probability of infection. For example, our analysis has found more than 5.4 million in the UK, 8 per cent of the population, are or have been infected with the coronavirus,” PTI quoted study co-author Professor Quentin Grafton, from ANU.