Europe Braces for Surge in Covid Patients to Hit Hospitals Soon

(Bloomberg) -- Europe’s hospitals have largely coped with the region’s reemergence as a coronavirus hot spot, but pressure is expected to grow as cases surge.

Authorities are imploring pandemic-weary citizens to knuckle down on hygiene and distancing rules over concern that health-care resources are set to get stretched. There’s already been a steady uptick in hospitalizations that could quickly spike the way it did in the spring.

“As with tidal waves, it might seem like we have time, but actually, in the end, it’s a race,” Aurelien Rousseau, director of the regional health authority for Paris, said on France’s BFM TV on Monday. “We’re at that point where we’re entering a race against time.

With countries from Spain to Ukraine posting record increases in recent days, authorities are struggling to devise restrictions that slow the spread while not pushing the economy over the edge and sparking public unrest.

Lower death and hospitalization rates have stoked an impression that the disease has lost its bite, sparking resistance to tougher restrictions. But after the Covid’s European resurgence was fueled by younger people, the contagion is spreading to more vulnerable individuals.

“There is transmission between the generations, and that is our major worry,” Rousseau said, noting that positive test rates in the Paris region are at unprecedented levels and that hospital stays for severe cases are just as long as they were during the spring peak in deaths.

Germany is feeling a similar sense of urgency, despite containing the fall surge in the disease better than many of its neighbors. Chancellor Angela Merkel warned last week that the country is reaching a watershed moment that will determine whether it regains or loses control of the pandemic.

Like other officials in the region, the leader of Europe’s largest economy has stepped up efforts to fight the disease. She’ll discuss new testing and quarantine measures with heads of Germany’s 16 states on Wednesday after convening a cabinet-level crisis committee on Monday and speaking with big-city mayors on Friday.

In Germany, where hospitalization numbers are still comparatively low -- fewer than 500 people were in intensive care as of last week -- authorities warned against complacency.

“We fear that in the near future, these numbers will rise considerably again on the normal wards and also in intensive care,” Susanne Herold, a professor at the Universities Giessen & Marburg Lung Center near Frankfurt, said in a press conference last week. “We are preparing for a new wave of patients that are seriously ill.”

Officials have shied away from reviving stringent national lockdowns -- opting instead for localized measures such as those imposed in parts of the U.K. Monday -- and that leaves them with little recourse beyond pleading with residents to be careful.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex urged people to wear masks while limiting social contacts and acting prudently.

“If not you’ll see in a few days, the intensive care services, the hospital services, all the health care staff and nurses, they’re going to be put rudely to the test,” he said on France Info radio. “The reality of the second wave is there. Nothing must be excluded, when we see the situation in our hospitals.”

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