Despite vaccine passport schemes and high vaccination rates in many of the countries affected, COVID cases across Europe are surging once again.
New coronavirus cases in Germany topped the 50,000 mark for the first time, with authorities pushing for the imposition of more restrictions on top of the ones that haven’t worked.
As Will Jones writes, “A late autumn surge in reported Covid infections is underway in Europe, with spikes in Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Norway, and the possible beginnings of one in France, Portugal and Italy. This is despite high vaccine coverage and the heavy use of vaccine passports in most of these countries including Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France.”
Jones notes that there is no new variant of the virus causing the spike and that virtually all of these countries already experienced a surge due to the delta variant.
Since all these countries have relatively high vaccination rates, one can only assume that the new surge is partly due to the waning effectiveness of vaccines.
As we highlighted yesterday, a choir concert in Germany that allowed only fully vaccinated or recovered people to attend, banning those who are unvaccinated but could provide a negative test, resulted in a COVID-19 outbreak that infected at least 24 people.
One place where COVID cases and deaths remain low compared to other European countries is Sweden, which never imposed a hard lockdown and has no vaccine passport scheme or mask mandate.
You’d think there might be a lesson in that.
But apparently, the very existence of “herd immunity” is now a ‘dangerous conspiracy theory’.