The Netherlands’ government plans to introduce a three-week partial lockdown to quell a fourth wave of Covid infections amid a spike in case numbers, the public broadcaster NOS reported on Friday.
It is the first recent lockdown affecting all people — whether vaccinated or not — in Western Europe, and it comes as the Netherlands registered 16,364 new cases on Thursday. That figure, a level not seen since early in the pandemic, was a 33 percent rise over the new cases registered a week earlier.
Starting on Saturday, restaurants, bars and cafes in the country will have to close at 7 p.m. Sporting events will be held without spectators. Residents will not be allowed to invite more than four guests into their homes. And social distancing rules will be reinstated, though stores that sell essentials will remain open.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Hugo de Jonge, the health minister, are expected to announce the measures on Friday evening.
Mr. Rutte’s cabinet will also discuss on Friday whether to introduce longer-term measures that would require people to provide proof of vaccination or past infection to get access to certain services or to participate in certain events.
About 76 percent of the country’s population is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to Our World in Data.
The Italian police on Friday searched the homes of four people in Milan affiliated with the “No Green Pass” movement, a mixed group that has been protesting for weeks over a nationwide coronavirus health-pass mandate.
The four people, whose names were not immediately released, are being investigated on accusations of harassing journalists who are reporting on the demonstrations. The rallies have become common occurrences in several Italian cities, creating traffic chaos and disrupting daily life.
Alberto Nobili, an antiterrorism prosecutor in Milan who is coordinating the investigation, confirmed that the searches had been carried out.
As in several other countries in Europe, demonstrations against coronavirus restrictions have become commonplace in Italy. This week, the Interior Ministry instructed local officials to consider banning demonstrations in some areas and to take measures to deal with unruly protesters.
“It’s about balancing rights — the right to demonstrate, but also the right to work, to study and to one’s health,” Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese said of the ministry’s instructions, which were outlined in a memorandum made public late Wednesday.
Protesters in several cities — Milan, Padua and Trieste, in particular — have staged frequent demonstrations, often on Saturday afternoons, in which they block traffic and limit access to downtown stores. The protesters object to a government requirement that all workers obtain a certificate known as a Green Pass to show that they have been vaccinated against the virus or have recently tested negative, or face fines and unpaid leave.
Local law enforcement authorities have been asked to identify areas within each city where mass gatherings should not take place as long as Italy’s pandemic state of emergency remains in effect. In many cases, these areas will include busy downtown shopping areas.
The ministry’s memorandum says that mayors and local officials can decide whether to require masks or social distancing at gatherings in their jurisdictions.
Although the memorandum does not ban protests outright, Stefano Puzzer, who led a group of dockworkers that transformed the northeastern port city of Trieste into a protest epicenter, said it had been designed to “repress demonstrations.”
He said the protests in Trieste had been peaceful and authorized by city officials.
“I will always be present at authorized demonstrations,” Mr. Puzzer said. “We have to be the first to uphold the law.”
China’s top leader has declared that the country has “overcome” the impact of the coronavirus, even as sporadic lockdowns continue in various areas and officials order greater scrutiny of imported frozen food and children’s clothes — both extremely unlikely sources of contagion.
The stringent, if sometimes impractical, restrictions stem from China’s struggle to maintain its “zero Covid” strategy. Other nations have gradually loosened restrictions as they vaccinate more people, allow more gatherings with limits and bolster their health care systems for those who get sick. By contrast, the Chinese Communist Party has staked a big share of credibility on its ability to stamp out the disease entirely.
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, said this week that the country had “overcome the impact of Covid-19.” In propaganda messaging from a major party meeting, Communist Party leaders touted the successes of their response in saving lives while playing down the huge social and economic cost of those measures.
Government officials have defended their approach, saying that it is “low cost” and has allowed the country to recover from the pandemic faster than others. So far, caseloads remain low. Officials have reported 1,280 in the current outbreak that began in mid-October.
But the limits have costs. In the case of new scrutiny on imports, scientists widely believe that they will do little to keep people from getting infected. Amid a fresh Covid-19 outbreak in the port city of Dalian, Chinese officials this week ordered businesses there that use imported frozen foods to stop their operations.
In a neighboring Hebei Province, officials tested hundreds of packages after several workers at a children’s clothing factory were found to have Covid-19. In Guangxi, a province 1,200 miles to the south of Hebei, officials went even further, testing every person who had touched or even received a package from the factory.
Not a single person outside the factory reported testing positive.
In addition to inspecting imported frozen foods, China has required that packages coming from overseas be sanitized, and has encouraged people to use masks and gloves when receiving deliveries. International health bodies have said there is a minimal chance of transmission on surfaces like cardboard.
Chinese officials have in the past suggested that imports could bring the disease into China. They have been under pressure from the international scientific community and world leaders to disclose more about the source of the outbreak, which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan nearly two years ago.
Officials have also continued to enforce lockdowns to address occasional breakouts. Entire cities have been shut down at a moment’s notice. One city in the southwest has been locked down four times in the past year. About 30,000 visitors to Shanghai’s Disneyland had to stay and get tested this month before being allowed to leave.
In Beijing, the authorities closed dozens of pharmacies that had been caught selling cough medicine without requiring customers to register with their name and ID.
The strategy could face a significant challenge as China prepares to host athletes and visitors for the Winter Olympics, which will be held in Beijing in February.
Organizers have said the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games will take place in a bubble in which athletes, broadcasters and journalists will be required to stay. Already, two foreign Olympic athletes who are in the country for related events have tested positive for Covid-19, Reuters reported on Friday.
Citing the pervasive spread of the coronavirus across Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis said on Thursday that all adults would be eligible for a booster shot because of their high risk of exposure, assuming that enough time had passed since their initial doses.
Mr. Polis, a Democrat, signed an executive order declaring the entire state at high risk from exposure and urged boosters for any adult at least six months past the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, or two months past the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Federal regulators have said that adults who received the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines are eligible for a booster if they are 65 or older, or if they are at increased risk because of medical conditions or where they work or live. People who got the Johnson & Johnson shot, which is available only to adults, are eligible. Those getting boosters can select any of the three vaccine brands.
On Tuesday, Pfizer and BioNTech asked the Food and Drug Administration to expand eligibility for their boosters to all adults. If the regulators sign off on that request, it would make official what health authorities say they already see happening frequently. Many people appear to be getting boosters whether or not they are technically eligible.
A growing body of early global research has shown that the vaccines available in the United States have remained highly protective against the disease’s worst outcomes over time, even during the summer surge of the highly transmissible Delta variant.
A number of published studies show that their protection against infection, with or without symptoms, has fallen. Public health experts say it does not mean the vaccines are not working. But the significance of waning effectiveness — and whether it suggests that all adults should be eligible for a booster — is still up for debate.
Mr. Polis’s order justified broadening access to boosters by saying that since the entire state of Colorado has seen significant spread of the virus, it qualified as the kind of high-risk environment for which federal regulators cleared boosters.
“We want to ensure that Coloradans have every tool they need to protect themselves from this deadly virus and to help reduce the stress on our hospitals and health care workers,” the governor said in a statement.
The order comes as Colorado faces its highest surge of virus cases in a year. As of Wednesday, the daily average of new cases was up 42 percent and average new deaths were up 52 percent over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database.
New lockdown restrictions for unvaccinated people in Austria are likely because new coronavirus cases in the country are rising rapidly, Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said on Thursday.
Though such restrictions would be a “very harsh measure,” they appear to be necessary and “probably inevitable,” the chancellor said at a news conference.
The Austrian national health agency is reporting an average of 760 new coronavirus cases a week for every 100,000 people, a rate that has more than doubled since late October.
About 64 percent of the country’s population has been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus so far — a larger share than in the United States or in Austria’s neighbors to the east, but smaller than in most Western European nations, according to government figures collated by the Our World in Data project.
The Austrian government said last week that it would bar people who are not fully vaccinated from entering places like restaurants and hair salons; that measure took effect on Monday. A lockdown like the one Mr. Schallenberg warned about would be much more restrictive.
“The situation in Austria and other European countries is serious,” Mr. Schallenberg said in a statement, noting that hospital intensive care units were filling up faster than expected.
The chancellor has been talking about the worsening picture in Austria for some time. “We are about to stumble into a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” he told The Associated Press last month.
At a news conference after a meeting with state governors last Friday, Mr. Schallenberg urged Austrians to get their shots.
“With a vaccination, we protect not only ourselves, but also our friends, family and colleagues,” he said, adding, “It is simply our responsibility to protect the people of our country.”
BERLIN — The University Hospital of Giessen, one of Germany’s foremost clinics for pulmonary disease, is at capacity. The number of Covid-19 patients has tripled in recent weeks. Nearly half of them are on ventilators.
And every single one is unvaccinated.
“I ask every patient: Why didn’t you get vaccinated?” said Dr. Susanne Herold, the head of infectious diseases, after her daily round on the ward on Thursday. “It’s a mix of people who distrust the vaccine, distrust the state and are often difficult to reach by public information campaigns.”
Patients like hers are the main drivers of a fourth wave of Covid-19 cases in Germany that has produced tens of thousands of new daily infections — more than the country has had at any point in the pandemic.
For Germany it is a startling turnabout. At the onset of the pandemic, Germany had set an example for how to manage the virus and keep the death toll low. It was quick to put in place widespread testing and treatment, expand the number of intensive care beds and had a trusted leader in Chancellor Angela Merkel, a trained scientist, whose government’s social distancing guidelines were widely observed.
But today, a combination of factors has propelled a new surge, among them wintry temperatures, a slow rollout of booster vaccines and an even more pronounced spike in infections in neighboring Eastern European nations like the Czech Republic. The fact that Germany is in a kind of political limbo as it transitions between governments has not helped.
“What we are experiencing is above all a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Health Minister Jens Spahn said this month.
