On the heels of enacting a nationwide lockdown, Austria has announced that all residents will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by February.
Health experts are warning the U.S. could be headed for another COVID-19 surge just as we enter the holiday season, following a massive new wave of infections in Europe – a troubling pattern seen throughout theEighteen months into the global health crisis that has killed 5.1 million people worldwide including more than 767,000 Americans, Europe has become the epicenter of the global health crisis once again.
Austria announced a 20-day lockdown beginning Monday and on Friday leaders there announced that all 9 million residents will be required to be vaccinated by February. Leaders there are also is telling unvaccinated individuals to stay at home and out of restaurants, cafes and other shops in hard-hit regions of the country.
“I don't think that what we're seeing in Europe necessarily means that we're in for a huge surge of serious illness and death the way that we saw last year here in the states,” says David Dowdy, MD, PhD, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a general internist with Baltimore Medical Services.
Then, later in the year, the Alpha variant of the virus took hold in the United Kingdom and the U.S. was again unprepared. By winter, the number of cases accelerated in every state in a major second surge that kept millions of Americans from traveling and gathering for the winter holidays.last December, cases in the U.S. – and in many parts of the world – began to fall. Some experts even suggested we’d turned a corner on the pandemic.popped up in India and spread to the U.K.
The impact of the Delta variant, which is three times more transmissible than the original virus and can even sicken some vaccinated individuals. For one thing, he says, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the two mRNA vaccines used predominantly in the U.S., are far more effective – 94-95% – than the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID shot widely administered across Europe.
“But I’m hopeful that because of some of the differences that maybe we’ll have a little bit of a different situation.”Dowdy agrees that Europe’s current troubles might not necessarily mean a major new winter surge in the U.S. Even so, Dowdy believes the rising rates of vaccination could limit the number of Americans who will be hospitalized with severe disease or die this winter.
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