BRUSSELS — Austria went into a major lockdown Monday to try to break the strong fourth wave of COVID-19 spreading across Europe, while the German health minister, Jens Spahn, warned that by the end of this winter “just about everyone in Germany will probably be either vaccinated, recovered or dead.”
“Immunity will be reached,” Spahn said at a Berlin news conference. “The question is whether it’s via vaccination or infection, and we explicitly recommend the path via vaccination.”
European governments are toughening their measures against COVID-19 in the face of soaring infection rates — more than 2 million new cases each week, the most since the pandemic began — and popular resistance, with violent protests over the weekend in numerous countries.
Tens of thousands of people protested official crackdowns and vaccine requirements in Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland and Croatia, with scattered violence and police use of tear gas and water cannons. Some protesters were organized by far-right parties, but many were simply fed up with almost two years of intermittent state controls over their lives in the name of public health.
Ahmed Aboutaleb, mayor of Rotterdam, Netherlands, where some of the worst protests erupted, called them an “orgy of violence” and said football hooligans were believed to have been involved.
Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, defended the right to demonstrate. “But what I will never accept is that idiots use sheer violence against the people who work for you and me every day to keep this country safe under the guise of: ‘We are dissatisfied.' "
Europe is once again the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, accounting for more than half the world’s reported COVID-19 deaths this month, according to the World Health Organization. The four countries with the world’s highest rates of reported new cases in the past week are Austria and three that border it, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic; 27 of the top 29 are in Europe.
With vaccination rates lagging and winter approaching, more governments are ringing alarm bells.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told her Christian Democratic Party on Monday that the situation is “highly dramatic” and that the latest surge is worse than anything Germany had suffered so far.
In what may be her last month as chancellor, as a new government is being formed, she warned that hospitals would soon be overwhelmed unless the fourth wave of the virus is broken and called on Germany’s 16 states to enforce even tighter restrictions to block the spread.
Germany, like many European countries, is at the same time pressing for citizens to get booster shots. But it faces a dwindling supply of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, which was partly developed in the country.
While the European Medicines Agency is poised to approve the vaccine for use on children ages 5 to 11 this week, first doses for children are not scheduled to be delivered to European Union countries until Dec. 20, Spahn said.
On Thursday, 553,000 vaccines were administered in Germany in one day, a daily total not seen since early August. Three-quarters of those shots were boosters, according to the health ministry.
Neighboring Austria on Monday began its fourth lockdown, one of the few in Western Europe since vaccines became widely available. Most stores, restaurants, sporting venues and cultural institutions shut, leaving the streets cold and quiet in the weeks before Christmas.
The lockdown, which only allows people to leave home to go to work or to procure groceries or medicines, will last at least 10 days and as many as 20 and comes after months of struggling attempts to halt the contagion through widespread testing and partial restrictions.