LISBON, Portugal (AP) – In the first week of December, the Portuguese Prime Minister gave his pandemic-weary people an early Christmas gift: restrictions on gatherings and travel due to COVID-19 would be lifted from December 23 to 26 so they could spend the holidays through with family and friends.
Shortly after those visits, the pandemic quickly got out of hand.
On January 6, the number of new daily COVID-19 cases in Portugal rose above 10,000 for the first time. In mid-January, when alarm bells rang as every day brought new infections and deaths, the government ordered a closure for at least a month and a week later the country’s schools closed.
But it was too little, too late. According to statistics from Johns Hopkins University, Portugal has had the most daily cases and deaths per 100,000 people in the world for almost a week.
Outside the country’s congested hospitals, long lines of ambulances wait for hours to deliver their COVID-19 patients.
Portugal’s troubles illustrate the risk of abandoning pandemic guards when a new, fast-spreading variant lurks unseen.
The spread of the pandemic across Europe is increasingly driven by a highly contagious viral mutation first discovered in South East England last year, health experts say. The threat is prompting governments to introduce tough new lockdowns and curfews.
Viggo Andreasen, an assistant professor of mathematical epidemiology at Roskilde University, west of Copenhagen, said the new variant is a game-changer.
“At first glance, things may look good, but below that looms the (new) variety,” he told The Associated Press. “Everyone in the company knows that a new game is on the way.”
In Denmark, the variant threatens to get out of control in the pandemic, despite its relatively early success in containing the spread of the virus. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said this month “it is a race against time” to get people vaccinated and slow the progress of the variant because it is already too widespread to stop.
The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands last week reported increasing cases of the variant, warning that it will increase hospitalizations and deaths.
“There are essentially two separate COVID-19 epidemics: one with the ‘old’ variant, where infections are decreasing, and another epidemic with the (new) variant, where infections are increasing, ” he said.
The Netherlands went into a severe five-week lockdown in mid-December, closing schools and non-essential businesses as new infections increase. Prime Minister Mark Rutte extended the lockdown on January 12 for another three weeks, citing concerns about the new variant.
Last week, the Dutch government took it a step further and introduced a curfew from 9 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. and limited the number of guests people can receive at home to one per day.
The discovery of the new variant has prompted other EU countries to tighten their lockdown measures. Belgium has banned all non-essential travel for residents until March, and France could soon begin a third lockdown if the 12-hour daily curfew doesn’t slow the spread of new infections.
Other mutated versions of the virus have surfaced in Brazil and South Africa.
According to experts, the British variety is likely to become the main source of infection in the United States in March. It has been reported in more than 20 states to date.
The US Government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, says scientists are preparing an upgrade for COVID-19 vaccines targeting the British and South African variants.
Moderna, the maker of one of the two vaccines used in the US, says it is beginning to test a possible booster dose against the South African version – a variant Fauci said was “even more ominous” than the British one.
Pfizer, which makes a similar COVID-19 vaccine, says its injection appears to be effective against the strain from Britain, although questions remain about the South African variant.
Amid those fears, the United States is reinstating COVID-19’s travel restrictions for non-American travelers from the United Kingdom, 26 other European countries, and Brazil, adding South Africa to the list.
It’s been a steep learning curve for Portugal.
Ricardo Mexia, head of the Portuguese National Association of Public Health Doctors, said that before restrictions were relaxed at Christmas, the Portuguese government should have stepped up its preparations for January, but it did not.
“The problem is not only not responding quickly, but not being proactive” to get ahead of the problems, he told the AP. Authorities “need to be more assertive”.
A Jan. 3 report by the Dr. Ricardo Jorge National Health Institute, which monitors the virus in Portugal, said tests had found 16 cases of the new variant in continental Portugal, 10 of which were in travelers at Lisbon airport. It didn’t mention where they came from.
The Portuguese authorities tried to make up for lost time and added even tougher restrictions to the lockdown just three days after it was announced. But new cases and deaths accumulated.
Just over two weeks later, the virus control agency estimated that there had been cases of the new variant in Portugal in early December and warned that the percentage of COVID-19 cases attributed to the British strain could reach 60% by early February.
It wasn’t until Saturday that the government, blaming the now devastating COVID-19 surge for the variant, halted flights to and from the UK.
The World Health Organization’s chief of emergencies said earlier this month that the agency is assessing the impact of the new variants, but warned that they are also being used as scapegoats.
“It’s just too easy to blame the variant and say, ‘It’s the virus that did it,’” said Dr. Michael Ryan to reporters in Geneva. “Well, unfortunately it’s also what we didn’t do that it did.”
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AP writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.