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Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 (nCoV-2019)

European COVID cases on the increase....

Netherlands going into partial lockdown this weekend.

www.reuters.com

Netherlands returns to partial lockdown amid COVID-19 surge

The Netherlands will return to a partial lockdown from Saturday after the government ordered restaurants and shops to close early and barred spectators from major sporting events in an effort to contain a rapid surge in COVID-19 cases.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

metro.co.uk

European countries set for partial lockdowns as Covid cases soar

Uneven vaccine coverage and a relaxation of measures have brought Europe to a 'critical point' in the pandemic.
metro.co.uk metro.co.uk
 
gabe said:
European COVID cases on the increase....

Netherlands going into partial lockdown this weekend.

www.reuters.com

Netherlands returns to partial lockdown amid COVID-19 surge

The Netherlands will return to a partial lockdown from Saturday after the government ordered restaurants and shops to close early and barred spectators from major sporting events in an effort to contain a rapid surge in COVID-19 cases.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

metro.co.uk

European countries set for partial lockdowns as Covid cases soar

Uneven vaccine coverage and a relaxation of measures have brought Europe to a 'critical point' in the pandemic.
metro.co.uk metro.co.uk
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The Danes are already there as well:

www.cnn.com

Denmark ditched its Covid rules two months ago. Now it's joined other EU nations in mulling new restrictions | CNN

Two months ago, Denmark was riding high. It lifted all remaining domestic coronavirus restrictions as the government declared Covid-19 was no longer "an illness which is a critical threat to society." But the optimism of September has been short-lived.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com

AoD
 
Not a good trend...

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The world's first anti-vaccination movement spread fears of half-cow babies​

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The world's first anti-vaccination movement spread fears of half-cow babies​


ANTIVAX-HISTORY - The world's first anti-vaccination movement spread fears of half-cow babies. 1,240 words, by Jess McHugh (Post special). Two photos.

In the early 19th century, British people finally had access to the first vaccine in history, one that promised to protect them from smallpox, among the deadliest diseases of the era. Many Britons were skeptical of the vaccine, however, with fears extending well beyond the fatigue and sore arm that go along with many modern shots. The side effects they dreaded were far more terrifying: blindness, deafness, ulcers, a gruesome skin condition called "cowpox mange" - even sprouting hoofs and horns.
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With that, the world's first anti-vaccination movement was born.

Just as quickly as doctors heralded Edward Jenner's revolutionary 1796 discovery that the deadly smallpox virus could be prevented with a cowpox vaccine, some Brits met the news with a superstitious distrust that bordered on hysteria. Opposition to vaccination would grow and evolve over the next 100 years to become one of the largest mass movements of 19th-century Britain. People refused the vaccine for medical, religious and even political reasons - plunging the nation into a debate that would rage for generations and foreshadow current coronavirus vaccine conspiracy theories.

"It was an enormous mass movement, and it built on many traditions, intellectual and otherwise, about liberty," said Frank Snowden, a historian of medicine at Yale University. "There was a rejection of vaccination on political grounds that was widely considered as another form of tyranny."

Yet Britons had been living under a viral tyranny for much longer. By the turn-of-the- 19th-century, smallpox had ravaged much of the world. In Europe, some 400,000 people were believed to die annually from the disease. Those who did survive were often permanently disfigured.

The turning point came - or at least ought to have come - when Jenner discovered that dairymaids were often protected from smallpox because of their exposure to the less dangerous cowpox. He conducted an experiment to test his hypothesis that exposure to this similar disease might protect others from smallpox. He extracted pus from a woman infected with cowpox, injected it into a healthy boy and exposed him to smallpox. The child did not become ill. Similar experiments bore out the same results.

Jenner and his supporters heralded this discovery for the deliverance that it was. Politicians, fellow doctors and major thinkers of the day rejoiced. The writer Robert Bloomfield penned a poem in praise of Jenner, calling his discovery a "blessing."

At the same time, some members of the general populace - along with several prominent doctors - were skeptical of the idea of being injected with a disease, especially a disease originating with a farm animal. Nineteenth-century Britain was a deeply religious society, and some condemned vaccination as a violation of humans' God-given healing abilities.

"One can see it in biblical terms as human beings created in the image of God, and therefore being supreme," Snowden said. "The vaccination movement injecting into human bodies this material from an inferior animal was seen as irreligious, blasphemous and medically wrong."

Fiery pamphlets, lectures and caricatures tipped off a war of the words that would galvanize huge numbers of Brits into the anti-vaccination movement. In an 1805 pamphlet, William Rowley, a member of the Royal College of Physicians, warned against vaccination, threatening the direst possible side effects. Rowley (among others) went so far as to suggest that the injection of cow material into a human body could cause a person to begin to resemble a cow, sprouting actual horns out of his head and hoofs in place of feet. Even those who could not read would have easily understood the color engravings of an ox-faced boy with an enormous red lump hanging off his cheek, or a child covered in open abscesses.

And cowpox, Rowley wrote, would not only mar an individual but could end his bloodline all together. After all, Rowley warned, "Who would marry into any family, at the risk of their offspring having filthy beastly diseases?"

Much like anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists of today and their fears of microchips, opponents of the early smallpox vaccine warned of bizarre mental effects, alongside the violent physical reactions. The physician Benjamin Moseley claimed, only somewhat facetiously, that Jenner's vaccine would lead to "cow mania," a kind of hysteria that might cause women to want to have sex with bulls and create half-human babies.

Moseley and Rowley teamed up to travel across the country giving lectures, warning against the dire effects of vaccination. The doctors also had an economic interest in steering people away from vaccination, as the Public Domain Review noted recently. Both practiced variolation, an older form of inoculation against smallpox that involved scraping matter from a smallpox sore to infect a healthy person with the disease. Variolation was much riskier than vaccination - many patients died, including one of King George III's sons - and it would eventually be entirely replaced by vaccination.

There was an important difference between anti-vaccine activists then and now: The range of choices was enormous in the medical field at the time. Britons could seek treatment from wise women or local healers, alongside physicians of varying legitimacy. And unlike today, there was neither scientific consensus on the efficacy of vaccines nor governing bodies such as the World Health Organization or the Food and Drug Administration to determine vaccine safety.

While fears of hoofed children and bestiality might seem ridiculous to a modern reader, some concerns were rooted in reality. Not only were vaccines much less safe than they are now - unsanitary needle practices meant patients risked tetanus, syphilis and hepatitis - they were also mysterious. Germ theory did not exist at the time of Jenner's discovery, and it was often thought that disease was passed through unsanitary places rather than from person to person, making the notion of injections confusing. While Jenner could prove empirically that the vaccine worked, he couldn't accurately explain why it worked.

The anti-vaccine movement would take on fresh momentum after England and Wales made the smallpox vaccine mandatory for children in 1853. Where anti-vaccine sentiment in the early 19th century was often amorphous and grass-roots, by the Victorian era a highly organized movement took shape, with anti-vaccination leagues sprouting local arms in cities and towns across Britain. By the end of the century, tens of thousands of people would take to the streets in protest, brandishing signs such as "Better a felon's cell than a poisoned babe."

Following the mandate, the protests were no longer limited to the vaccine itself. Rather, the vaccine became a magnet for broader distrust in government. "Like today, people in the middle part of the 19th century, when vaccination is made compulsory, are experiencing an enormous upheaval in terms of the political environment, the scientific and medical environment, technological change, new information, new connectedness - everything is changing so fast," said Kristin Hussey, a historian of medicine and author of "Imperial Bodies in London." "Vaccination really becomes a lightning rod for a lot of these concerns around the individual and the state."

The positive effect of the mandate, however, was impossible to deny. Despite the anti-vaccine movement, the laws making smallpox vaccination compulsory succeeded by many measures. Smallpox deaths dropped by more than a quarter in the years after the passage of the mandate. Among children, the result was even starker: Their death rate dropped by 50 percent. And by 1934 - some 138 years after Jenner's discovery - smallpox would be considered eradicated in Britain.
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How Europeans brought sickness to the New World​


Isolated tribes who emerge today face echoes of the epidemics that began in 1492 and were repeated for centuries​


From link.

In the Americas, the arrival of Europeans brought disease, war, and slavery to many indigenous peoples. Can some of the world's last isolated groups avoid those fates as they make contact in the 21st century?
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When the Taino gathered on the shores of San Salvador Island to welcome a small party of foreign sailors on 12 October 1492, they had little idea what lay in store. They laid down their weapons willingly and brought the foreign sailors—Christopher Columbus and his crewmen—tokens of friendship: parrots, bits of cotton thread, and other presents. Columbus later wrote that the Taino "remained so much our friends that it was a marvel."

A year later, Columbus built his first town on the nearby island of Hispaniola, where the Taino numbered at least 60,000 and possibly as many as 8 million, according to some estimates. But by 1548, the Taino population there had plummeted to less than 500. Lacking immunity to Old World pathogens carried by the Spanish, Hispaniola's indigenous inhabitants fell victim to terrible plagues of smallpox, influenza, and other viruses.
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Epidemics soon became a common consequence of contact. In April 1520, Spanish forces landed in what is now Veracruz, Mexico, unwittingly bringing along an African slave infected with smallpox. Two months later, Spanish troops entered the capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlán, and by mid-October the virus was sweeping through the city (depicted above in images from the Florentine codex, a document written by a 16th century Spanish friar), killing nearly half of the population, which scholars today estimate at 50,000 to 300,000 people. The dead included the Aztec ruler, Cuitláhuac, and many of his senior advisers. By the time Hernán Cortés and his troops began their final assault on Tenochtitlán, bodies lay scattered over the city, allowing the small Spanish force to overwhelm the shocked defenders.
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But not all indigenous groups suffered such a grim fate. The smallpox virus spread more easily in densely populated Tenochtitláan than it did in sparsely inhabited regions, such as the Great Plains of the United States. There migratory hunter-gatherers followed the great bison herds, and disease outbreaks were sometimes contained in single bands. During the smallpox epidemic of 1837 to 1838 along the Upper Missouri River, for example, some Blackfoot bands suffered heavy losses, while neighboring Gros Ventre people escaped nearly unscathed. The Gros Ventre were ultimately forced to live on reservations, where some left beautiful "ledger art", drawing and preserving details of their dress and way of life in ledgers provided by Bureau of Indian Affairs agents. Contact with Europeans also brought one major benefit to Plains populations: the horse, which made following and hunting bison herds easier.
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In remote parts of the Americas such as the Amazon, resource extraction has driven many contacts with indigenous groups. During the late 1880s, European and American industries producing gaskets, electrical insulators, bicycle tires, and other goods created an immense demand for rubber. Amazon forests were rich in rubber-producing trees: All that was lacking, it seemed, was a local workforce to tap them. Unscrupulous rubber merchants eventually enslaved "hundreds of thousands of Indians" from isolated Amazonian tribes to work as rubber tappers, according to a 1988 study by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. To evade capture, many isolated tribes fled into ever more remote regions of the rainforest, where a few remain isolated even today. In 1914, new rubber plantations in Asia and Africa supplanted Amazonian rubber.
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At the turn of the 20th century, projects such as the construction of telegraph lines and highways began pushing into the Brazilian Amazon, often cutting through territories inhabited by isolated tribes. To lure nomadic hunter-gatherers out of the forests and into settled communities, government representatives used a technique known as the "attraction front" for many decades. Leaving out gifts of metal tools in gardens or tied to ropes in a forest clearing, they wooed isolated groups into contact, and later forced them to work for consumer goods they had come to depend on. But contact on these fronts often led to the transmission of diseases, until the Brazil government adopted an official "no contact" policy in 1988 and phased out these practices.
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During the late 1950s and 1960s, a group of Yanomami living near the Venezuelan border were nearly wiped out by measles and another contagious disease after they made contact with the outside world. Nearly 40 years later, a surviving child, Davi Kopenawa, described how contact happened. Along the Araçá River, Kopenawa's grandparents and others met white people for the first time and spotted their metal tools. "They longed for them," Kopenawa recalled, and occasionally visited these strangers to get a machete or ax. They then shared the tools freely among their community. Today, after contact, the Yanomami number around 32,000, and Kopenawa is an important advocate for his people.
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Europe’s least-vaccinated countries are back in pandemic crisis​

From link.

The World Health Organization says Europe is once again the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic. If that epicentre has its own epicentre, it is Eastern Europe.

Romania and Bulgaria in particular are going through a fresh pandemic hell, not because of a lack of vaccines – they are in surplus – but because of extreme vaccine skepticism and resistance to isolating people who are unvaccinated, as Austria and a few other countries are now doing. On Wednesday, the Czech Republic announced it would ban unvaccinated people from public events and services.

The pandemic crisis is so severe in Romania that its overburdened hospitals are sending some of their patients to Denmark, Germany and other European Union countries with spare hospital capacity. Doctors from EU countries are being flown into Romania to assist local medics, who are at breaking point.

Mistrust of government and its institutions appears to be behind the unusually low vaccination numbers in Eastern Europe, including Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Ukraine.

“Vaccination programs only work if people trust those responsible for them, and, as we are seeing in some countries, trust is scarce,” said Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in an interview. “This is the case in Romania and Bulgaria, especially in Bulgaria, where people voted for a party standing on an explicit anti-corruption agenda. The problem in both these countries is not just distrust of government but also distrust of the health system.”
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According to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker, only 23 per cent of the eligible population of Bulgaria is fully vaccinated, the lowest rate in the EU and one of the lowest in the developed world; in Romania, it’s 35 per cent.

In the EU as a whole, more than 68 per cent of eligible people are fully vaccinated, and some countries, such as Italy and France, are at 75 per cent or more.

In an interview, Raed Arafat, Romania’s Secretary of State and head of the Department of Emergency Situations in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, said the country’s vaccination rate fell to about 20,000 a day from 100,000 about three weeks ago, when parliament failed to pass legislation to introduce a highly restrictive green pass. The pass would have required employees to show they were vaccinated before going to work. “Fear of knowing they would need the pass drove up the vaccination numbers,” he said. “When the legislation failed by two votes, the vaccination rate slowed a lot.”
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Vaccine shortages are not the problem. Airfinity, a British health intelligence and analytics firm, says about 1.5 billion doses are being made globally every month and the output is rising. “For large Western countries, the challenge is no longer supply, but demand,” said Airfinity CEO Rasmus Bech Hansen.

The lack of vaccine demand in Romania and Bulgaria is reflected in their high death rates.

On Wednesday, Romania – population 19.3 million – reported 350 COVID-19 deaths and 3,535 new cases, though the latter figure is well off its October peak.

Daily confirmed deaths per million people in Bulgaria, on a seven-day rolling average, reached a high of almost 25 in mid-November, according to the Our World in Data site. That was more than seven times greater than the EU average. Romania was a close second, with a high of almost 24 deaths per million (in recent days, the number of deaths in both countries have dipped slightly but remain the highest in the EU). Hungary and Latvia are also reporting very high death rates.

Almost all the deaths in these countries are among the unvaccinated. “Nine out of 10 patients in our intensive-care unit die,” said Ivan Poromanski, the head of the Pirogov Hospital in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, in a recent TV interview, adding that deaths among the vaccinated are “minimal.”

The state of the EU pandemic almost two years after its outbreak reveals an east-west divide. At first, it was the countries in the west of the EU, such as France and Italy, the original epicentre of the European pandemic, that suffered the most. The Eastern countries were left relatively unscathed.

Since the vaccine rollout started about a year ago, the situation has reversed. The Eastern EU countries, where vaccine skepticism is highest, are suffering the most from the pandemic, though all EU countries and the U.K. have reported rises in the number of cases and deaths since the late summer. In Germany, where the vaccination rate is just under the EU average, the number of cases has climbed to a record and deaths to a six-month high.

An October report in Geopolitical Monitor said Romania and Bulgaria have a mistrust of government that dates back to the countries’ “Ottoman tutelage, which has played a part in fostering a deep-seated distrust of the state.”

The report noted that since Romania and Bulgaria see COVID-19 vaccine campaigns as “top-down and state-driven endeavours, turning skeptics into believers appears to be an unusually daunting challenge.” So far, every pro-vaccine campaign has failed to raise vaccination rates.

A Eurobarometer survey from early this year found that only 22 per cent of Bulgarians and 31 per cent of Romanians trusted their governments. Trust in medical authorities was higher, but not by much. Revolving governments haven’t helped. Bulgaria has had three elections in the past year alone. Politicians on the campaign trail have been reluctant to suggest imposing restrictions that could prove politically unpopular.

The vaccine hesitancy has been boosted by a few high-profile politicians and clerics who have made wildly unsubstantiated claims about the dangers of vaccines. Diana Sosoaca, a member of Romania’s upper house of parliament, has called the pandemic “the lie of the century” and said Romanians who get vaccinated are “like lambs to the slaughter.”
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