New Coronavirus News from 23 Nov 2021

Britain outpaces eurozone as bloc held back by new Covid surge [Telegraph.co.uk, 23 Nov 2021]

ByTim Wallace

Experts anticipate close to zero economic growth in the eurozone in the final months of the year

Britain’s economy is outpacing the eurozone as supply shortages and Covid fears held back growth on the continent this month even before the latest restrictions came into force in Austria.

Demand is rising strongly in the UK, according to the purchasing managers’ index, an influential survey from IHS Markit, indicating the recovery has further to run.

The index held almost steady at 57.7 in November, compared to 57.8 in October. Any score of above 50 indicates growth in the private sector, so this suggests the expansion is being maintained, led by the services industry but supported by an acceleration in manufacturing.

This is stronger than the eurozone’s index which picked up to 55.8 from 54.2 in October.

Economists warned this may prove the high point for growth on the continent as surging Covid cases in countries including Germany and Belgium threaten to bring new restrictions.

Rising infections already appear to be affecting households’ spending patterns, hitting tourism and recreation spending, while supply problems dragged down car manufacturing, particularly important to countries such as Germany, for the third consecutive month.

However the survey also found rising production of household goods, technology and food and drink.

Melanie Debono at Pantheon Macroeconomics said: “We doubt November’s survey has captured the recent deterioration in the virus situation fully. With virus cases rising sharply in many of the major eurozone economies and restrictions returning in some, manufacturing still constrained by supply issues and the energy crunch rumbling on, it seems more likely than not that the PMI will soften in December and perhaps even heading into 2022.”

She predicts German growth of “little more than zero” in the final three months of the year, warning of growing “downside risks” to her forecast of 0.7pc for the eurozone as a whole.

By contrast the UK should expand by 0.8pc in the same period, according to Bethany Beckett at Capital Economics.

“The latest batch of PMIs indicate that the economy fared reasonably well in November but brought further signs that the rise in price pressures has continued,” she said.

“That means that a hike to interest rates at the Bank of England’s upcoming Monetary Policy Committee meeting in December still looks likely.”

Inflationary pressures are sweeping the eurozone and the UK.

Input pressures for manufacturers and services businesses accelerated to a new record pace in the UK, indicating the rise in prices that has worried central bankers is not letting up yet.

COVID-19: How many more people could die of coronavirus in UK and how will European countries fare? Here's what the data suggests [Sky News, 23 Nov 2021]

By Ed Conway

The question, unpalatable as it is, is worth asking for a few reasons.

The first is that while the death toll from the pandemic is not mounting at anything like the rate it was in spring 2020 or last winter, it is, nonetheless, creeping higher.

The latest figures, released on Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics, showed the death toll in the UK had reached 167,646. Given that many of the worst-case scenarios early in the pandemic had talked of tens of thousands of deaths, even now this figure remains shocking.

Of course, the vast majority of those deaths happened in the first two waves - just under 57,000 in the first one, and almost 95,000 in the second - but there have been 16,163 deaths since May, despite Britain having a high level of vaccination.

Cases are rising again in much of Europe - sharply in the case of countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, with the latter going back into a full lockdown as a result.

Some have warned that the UK could face another cruel winter of COVID-19 deaths and are pushing for more restrictions; the government insists it sees nothing in the data so far to push it from its "Plan A".

So the question is of more than passing importance: how many people would die if the UK really did face another wave of the virus? How does this compare to other countries around Europe?

Working out an answer is less simple than you might have thought, for not only do you need to weigh the levels of vaccination here and in other countries, you also need to look at age breakdowns and at the proportion of each country which has been infected in the past.

Happily, a group of epidemiologists at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) have just done that.

Their modelling is an illustration of the number of people who might be hospitalised or die if the country were to be wholly infected with COVID at this point.

There are many provisos: it doesn't ponder the efficacy or waning of different vaccines; it doesn't adjust for the risk of new variants of the disease. It is an illustration of what could happen if everyone in the population were exposed to COVID right now - not a prediction of what is going to happen.

Even so, the findings from the LSHTM study are strikingly encouraging, for the UK at least.
It found that there could be 10,479 more deaths in England.

Consider: this is less than the 12,540 that have died since May, and infinitesimally smaller than any of the previous waves of deaths.

Their model looked at England rather than the UK because of the availability of data, but it's likely that the rest of the UK would see broadly similar results.

Population-adjust the figures, and compare them to the rest of the Europe, and the news is similarly reassuring.

The level of "maximum remaining COVID-19 deaths" in England is, at 19 per 100,000 of the population, the lowest in Europe.

It's a similar picture for hospitalisations: according to the LSHTM modelling England would face fewer hospitalisations than other European countries even if the virus in its current form were to infect everyone in the country.

What's particularly striking is how much higher many other European countries are on this metric: Germany faces potential deaths of 137 per 100,000; the Netherlands 92 per 100k, Austria 60 per 100k.

The numbers imply that the threat of mortality in many of these countries, which are now facing steep rises in infections, is considerably greater than in England. In some countries the risk is higher still: in Greece the potential deaths are 151 per 100,000 and in Romania it's 356 per 100,000.

Why these stark differences?

In large part the answer is precisely what you'd expect: Britain has higher levels of vaccinations, especially among the elderly, than countries like Germany, Austria or Romania. It has slightly higher levels of natural antibodies from previous infection as well.

This modelling is an illustration, not a prediction - and comes with plenty of provisos.

The fact that it suggests such a low level of potential deaths has to be set against the very high number of deaths in the UK during the previous waves of the pandemic.

But still: if it is to be believed, it's quite plausible that even a sharp rise in COVID cases could be absorbed in the UK without anything like the mortality levels of previous waves; nothing like it.

Bodies pile up outside hospital morgue as Romania struggles with fourth wave of Covid [CNN, 23 Nov 2021]

By Cristiana Moisescu and Ben Wedeman

Bucharest, Romania (CNN)"It's relentless -- relentless," sighed nurse Claudiu Ionita, standing in front of a line of gurneys in Bucharest University Hospital's morgue. On each gurney lay a body inside a black plastic bag.

The morgue has a capacity for 15 bodies, but on the day CNN visited, it had received 41. The excess bodies filled the corridor outside, while wails echoed from within the morgue. A woman had been allowed inside for a final glimpse of her father.

Bucharest University Hospital is the Romanian capital's largest medical facility treating Covid-19 patients and is struggling through the country's fourth wave, its worst yet.

"I never thought, when I started this job, that I would live through something like this," said Ionita. "I never thought such a catastrophe could happen, that we'd end up sending whole families to their graves."

Several floors above, all the beds but one in the hospital's now-expanded intensive care units were full. A nurse was changing the sheets on the one vacant bed -- empty, because the person who occupied it now lay in the morgue.

Romania has one of Europe's lowest vaccination rates.

Just under 36% of the population has been vaccinated, even though the country's vaccination campaign got off to a good start last December.

Medical workers and officials attribute this low vaccination rate to a variety of factors, including suspicion of the authorities, deeply held religious beliefs, and a flood of misinformation surging through social media.

When Dr. Alexandra Munteanu, 32, arrived for duty at one of Bucharest's vaccination centers after an overnight shift in hospital, she found turnout was low. She's perplexed that the gravity of the disease just doesn't seem to have sunk in. "There are lots of doctors, myself included, who work with Covid patients, and we are trying to tell people this disease actually exists," she said.

One of the country's most vocal and high-profile anti-vaxxers is Diana Sosoaca, a member of the Romanian Senate. In one of her many public stunts she tried to block people from entering a vaccine center in her constituency in the northeast of the country.

"If you love your children, stop the vaccinations," she says in a video clip on her Facebook page. "Don't kill them!"

The vaccines on offer in Romania have been extensively tested for use in children and have proven to be safe and effective, but that hasn't stopped her and others from spreading wild rumors on social media and local television.

Officials and medical personnel are exasperated that public figures have done so much to undermine their efforts.

"Look at the reality," said Col. Dr. Valeriu Gheorghita, an army doctor who runs the national vaccination campaign. "We have our intensive care units full of patients. We have lots of new cases. We have, unfortunately, hundreds of deaths every day. So this is the reality. And more than 90% of patients who died were unvaccinated."

In Bucharest, a huge banner has gone up, covering half the façade of a building on a major boulevard. "They're suffocating. They're begging us. They're regretting," are the words printed in massive black letters above black-and-white photographs of medics struggling over Covid patients in an intensive care unit.

Down below, few passers-by glance up at the poster, and even fewer cared to share their thoughts with CNN. Soon, however, that banner will go up in other major cities in the country.
"There's manipulation," said a woman who gave her name only as Claudia, adding: "Some people don't believe in the vaccines."

Mayor: 'It's not a safe vaccine'
Nowhere is that suspicion more apparent than in the countryside, where Covid-19 vaccination rates plummet to about half of those in urban areas.

Suceava County, an hour's flight northeast of Bucharest, has the lowest overall vaccination rate in the country.

Here, the manager of the main hospital, Dr. Alexandru Calancea, 40, talks about the particularity of this region, where he was born and bred.

"This county is very religious. This is an area that has a strong religious tradition, and a lot of religious people. [...] Very few [priests] are pro-vaccine, and I definitely know some who are anti-vax. Most of them choose not to say anything, either for or against. We have proof, from the hospital, from patients who come from the same religious communities, where their priest, or their pastor, has advised them to not get vaccinated, just like that."

Just outside Suceava, in the village of Bosanci, such a pastor also serves as the village mayor. Neculai Miron has been one of the most vocal anti-vax public figures in the country, and today is no different.

"We're not against vaccination, but we want to verify it, to satisfy our worries, because there have been many side effects," he told CNN. "We don't think that the vaccine components are very safe. It's not a safe vaccine."

The medical data doesn't sway him, and neither does the local GP, whom he took the CNN team to see.

Dr. Daniela Afadaroaie administers the vaccine to about 10 people every other day, using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The latest official records show that just under 11% of the village was vaccinated as of early November 2021.

While she talked about the situation in the village, the mayor, Miron, hovered around the doctor's desk, peering down at the papers on her desk to see who had been vaccinated.

"When are you going to get vaccinated, Mr. Mayor?" asked Afadaroaie, laughing.

"I don't need to get vaccinated," he shot back. "I'm perfectly healthy." The doctor's explanation that the vaccine helps keep you that way fell on deaf ears.

Pastor: 'I believe what I see, rather than what I hear'
In rural villages like this, poverty and lack of education, together with local leaders' personal influence and traditional religious beliefs, can make for a deadly combination.

But the local Pentecostal pastor, Dragos Croitoru, insisted he was unaware of any deaths from Covid-19 in the parish. "Here in the church, we don't have any cases of people who are sick with coronavirus. We have a zero percent mortality rate, I don't know anyone who's died of coronavirus here in our parish. And I believe what I see, rather than what I hear," he said.

Despite hearing from CNN about the bodies of Covid-19 victims filling the morgue at Bucharest University Hospital, Croitoru was unconvinced. "Bucharest is bigger than Bosanci, as far as I know," he chuckled. "We haven't had any dead. Maybe we've had a few people who have been ill in the village, yes, as far as I know, yes. But the mortality rate in our church has been zero."

The mortality rate is certainly high elsewhere in this mostly rural county. Suceava ranked third highest in Covid-19 mortality rates for the whole country as of early November, according to figures from the Public Health Unit, which monitors deaths.

A corner of the main cemetery in Suceava, the county seat that's about 10 minutes from Bosanci, is full of freshly dug graves. In the cemetery's chapel, a service is underway. On the hill behind the chapel, mourners gather for a funeral. Nearby, another grave is being prepared.
The wooden crosses over each new grave don't indicate the cause of death, so it's unclear how many died from the virus. A man working on one of the graves, however, said the number of people being buried of late was far higher than usual.

"Eternal regrets," reads a ribbon draped across one of the graves.

Back in the morgue of the Bucharest University Hospital, a medic hammered a nail into a wooden coffin. A colleague sprayed the coffin with disinfectant.

For those who die of Covid, there will be no open-casket funerals.

"The vaccine means the difference between life and death," said Ionita, the nurse. "People should understand that. Maybe in their last hour they should understand that."

For those shrouded in the black body bags before him, it is already too late.

As COVID-19 cases surge, Germany, Austria close many Christmas markets [National Catholic Reporter, 23 Nov 2021]

by Anli Serfontein

BERLIN — Some of the world's most iconic Christmas markets in Germany and Austria were forced to close shortly after or just before they opened, as COVID-19 infections surged across Europe.

After the 2020 pre-vaccine, lockdowned Christmas season with no Christmas markets, the German-speaking countries were looking forward to a return to pre-COVID-19 times.

Christmas markets belong to German Advent social life and normally run from the week before the first Sunday of Advent until a day or two before Christmas Eve. This is where they meet up for a drink or a bite to eat while buying handicraft or typical local specialties as gifts.

Compared to the nearly fully vaccinated southwestern European countries like Portugal or Spain, the German-speaking countries of Austria, Switzerland and Germany have a much lower vaccination rate, with 68% of Germans and 66% of Austrians vaccinated.

Some Catholic bishops, like Berlin's Archbishop Heiner Koch, have announced only vaccinated people or people who had recovered from COVID-19 would be allowed into Christmas church services.

The German states of Bavaria and Saxony announced Nov. 19 they would close all Christmas markets Nov. 22. Many markets in northern and western Germany opened under stringent conditions for the first time since 2019.

Barely an hour after one of the world's most beautiful Christmas markets — the tourist magnet Salzburg Christkindlmarkt — opened on the square in front of Salzburg's Catholic cathedral Nov. 18, regional politicians announced a full lockdown would being Nov. 22. Salzburg is one of Austria's COVID-19 hot spots.

"The lights will continue to burn, but the stalls will be closed," Wolfgang Haider, chairman of the Salzburg Christkindlmarkt association, told the Austrian ORF broadcaster afterward. He estimated the financial loss to be at least 2 million euros, which will hit the exhibitors. "These are pure operating costs," not profit, he added.

During the news conference announcing the lockdown, a local journalist got up to tell the city officials that, on the market square, many of the hundred Christmas market stall holders were openly crying after they received the news. Many of these stalls are family-run small businesses.

A day later, it was announced that the whole of Austria would go into a three-week lockdown — and that, for the second consecutive year, all Christmas markets, hotels and retail stores would have to close until Dec. 13; it was unclear whether they would be able to open again.

In Germany, the Bavaria and Saxony regulations hit some of the oldest and most traditional Christmas markets in Germany. Saxony has the lowest vaccination rate in Germany — just 58% of the population is fully vaccinated, and it is home to many anti-vaxxers.

Holger Zastrow, organizer of various Dresden Christmas markets, told the local MDR broadcaster: "I am very disappointed. I have never experienced anything so ignorant and insensitive."

Zastrow said he was worried that the Christmas culture in Saxony was being lost. He said he believes the area is the authentic motherland of Christmas. He said he sees Christmas not in terms of religion, but in terms of century-old customs.

In Berlin, only a few big markets opened Nov. 22 under stringent conditions. Since the 2016 terrorist attack on Berlin's Breitscheidplatz, the Berlin markets have had concrete barriers and an increased deployment of security personnel.

In Osnabrück, Bishop Franz-Josef Bode called on people get vaccinated against COVID-19. He opened church premises for public vaccination campaigns.

"Getting vaccinated against coronavirus is a moral obligation for everyone — unless there are health reasons for not doing so. We have a responsibility not only to ourselves, but also to our neighbors," the bishop said. "Those who do not get vaccinated should consider that they are harming the weakest in society."

On Nov. 22, the permanent council of the German bishops' conference met in Würzburg. Afterward, it issued a statement saying bishops were witnessing "the progression of the fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic taking place at a pace that is almost unstoppable. The incidence figures, new infections and deaths are reaching frightening proportions."

"We strongly urge Catholics and all people in our country to get vaccinated, to the fullest extent possible. Vaccinating in this pandemic is an obligation of justice, solidarity and charity.
From an ethical point of view, it is a moral duty. We must protect ourselves and others," the statement said.

U.S. adds Germany and Denmark to "do not travel" list as COVID cases rise, joining several other European countries [CBS News, 23 Nov 2021]

BY CAITLIN O'KANE

The U.S. has issued a travel advisory for Germany and Denmark due to the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the two European countries, Reuters reports. The European region as a whole has seen a recent rise in infections.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now considers both Germany and Denmark "Level Four: Very High," telling Americans to avoid travel there. The State Department also issued "Do Not Travel" advisories for both countries.

Numerous European countries are on the CDC's list of "Level Four" countries, including Austria, Britain, Belgium, Greece, Norway, Switzerland, Romania, Ireland and the Czech Republic.

The World Health Organization predicts Europe could reach over 2.2 million COVID-19 deaths by March 2022. The projection comes after the organization said Europe and Asia were once again the epicenter of the pandemic earlier this month.

On Monday, Austria officially started a full nationwide coronavirus lockdown.

It was the first country in the European Union to reinstitute such stringent measures amid the fourth wave of the pandemic. About 50,000 protesters turned out over the weekend to oppose the country's fourth lockdown. Austria is also instating a nationwide vaccine mandate, meaning by February 1, all Austrians over the age of 18 will have to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, by law.

COVID-19 cases in the European region, which stretches into Central Asia and includes 53 countries, rose to nearly 4,200 per day last week, WHO reported. This is double the levels recorded at the end of September, according to the Associated Press.

There have been 1.5 million cumulative deaths in the region since the pandemic began.

On November 4, WHO Europe projected that another half a million lives may be lost to COVID-19 before February 2022. The organization also said that if Europe and Asia achieved 95% universal mask wearing, they could save up to 188,000 of those lives, and stressed that vaccines are the "most powerful asset" to stopping the spread of COVID-19.

In the U.S., COVID-19 deaths in 2021 have surpassed the 2020 death toll, according to Johns Hopkins University. Cases are rising in more than 30 states ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday — with the latest surge straining hospitals in the Upper Midwest.

Over the weekend, 3 million Americans received a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine after the FDA and CDC expanded access to Moderna's and Pfizer's boosters for all adults, the White House reported.