This is a subscriber-only article
Victoria state in Australia has a population of 6.8m, about the same as the island of Ireland. Its capital, Melbourne, saw a sharp increase in cases of COVID-19 in recent months and imposed strong lockdown measures. On Sunday, borrowing an expression from the cricket commentators, the state’s public health officials announced another ‘doughnut day’.
A doughnut, also known as a duck, describes the failure of the player departing the field to score a single run, dismissed for a big fat zero.
The republic’s health officials have been careful to compare the recent incidence of new infections
The officials were not talking about cricket – they were talking about the absence of new cases of COVID-19. There have been no cases at all – zilch, zero. Ireland, both north and south, has been registering up to 2,000 per day in recent weeks.
The republic’s health officials have been careful to compare the recent incidence of new infections – now moderating, but at levels well above the records set during the first wave – with the figures elsewhere in Europe, where most countries have seen even worse numbers.
Europe’s emergence as the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic needs some explaining
There has been a studied reluctance to offer comparisons with the best non-European performers, of which Australia is just one example. ‘State beating almost all European countries in fight to control virus’ trumpeted The Irish Times on Saturday last.
Europe’s emergence as the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic needs some explaining. According to the daily tally from the AFP news agency, Europe, with about 7% of the planet’s population, has recently been registering almost half of the worldwide daily total of new infections.
Positive cases have been falling in some regions and the loss of control in Europe has alarmed the World Health Organisation. How could this wealthy region, equipped with stable governments and well-developed health infrastructure, which had relative success in containing the first wave, have failed so badly in avoiding the second?
There are varieties of the virus, equally dangerous it would appear, but possessing a signature that the geneticists can use to trace channels of transmission
Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland seem to have come up with a partial answer. There are varieties of the virus, equally dangerous it would appear, but possessing a signature that the geneticists can use to trace channels of transmission.
One variant is called 20A.EU1 and the international research team has reported that the strain, originally observed in Spain, has been spreading across Europe since July. There was no effective testing at most European airports until recently and there is still none in Ireland.
The study estimates that up to 80% of current infections in some European countries (the figure for the 56 Irish samples is 60%) have the signature of this Spanish-originating variant, which points the finger at returning holidaymakers.
There is a pattern that indicates the spread out of Spain has been greatest in countries that had quarantine-free travel or had ineffective or unenforced quarantine requirements.
It follows that two errors were made during the summer, in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe
The 60% estimate for Ireland does not mean that all those who tested positive had been to Spain, but it looks as if introduction from Spain was a major component in the second wave, additional to the reservoir of disease still left over from the incomplete suppression of the first. The full report can be found here.
It follows that two errors were made during the summer, in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe. The first was premature reopening, before the first wave had truly been suppressed and before an adequate test and trace capability had been implemented.
The second was the failure to introduce, until recently, pre-departure testing at airports, still not available in Ireland, although most major European airports have finally got systems in place.
It was Europe’s misfortune that a major new outbreak should have arisen in Spain, where the government had bowed to pressure and reopened inbound tourism from June onwards. The countries with the fewest effective restrictions on travel to Spain have shown the greatest concentration of the Spain-originating version of the virus.
The Basel study says that most of these cases could have been seeded by whatever numbers returned from Spain
When new cases began to rise rapidly in Ireland in September, the public health committee reported that very few cases were connected to travel, attributing most to what they call ‘community transmission’. The Basel study says that most of these cases could have been seeded by whatever numbers returned from Spain.
The last word goes to Emma Hodcroft, quoted in The Financial Times: “Long-term border closures and severe travel restrictions aren’t feasible or desirable, but from the spread of 20A.EU1, it seems clear that the measures in place were often not sufficient to stop onward transmission of introduced variants this summer.
“When countries have worked hard to get SARS-CoV-2 cases down to low numbers, identifying better ways to ‘open up’ without risking a rise in cases is critical.”
SHARING OPTIONS: