If Italy was the harbinger of the first wave of Europe’s coronavirus pandemic in February, Spain is the portent of its second.
France is also surging, as are parts of Eastern Europe, and cases are ticking up in Germany, Greece, Italy and Belgium, too, but in the past week, Spain has recorded the most new cases on the continent by far — more than 53,000. With 114 new infections per 100,000 people in that time, the virus is spreading faster in Spain than in the United States, more than twice as fast as in France, about eight times the rate in Italy and Britain, and 10 times the pace in Germany.
Spain was already one of the hardest-hit countries in Europe, and now has about 440,000 cases and more than 29,000 deaths. But after one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns, which did check the virus’s spread, it then enjoyed one of the most rapid reopenings. The return of nightlife and group activities — far faster than most of its European neighbors — has contributed to the epidemic’s resurgence.
Now, as other Europeans mull how to restart their economies while still protecting human life, the Spanish have become an early bellwether for how a second wave might happen, how hard it might hit and how it could be contained.
“Perhaps Spain is the canary in the coal mine,” said Prof. Antoni Trilla, an epidemiologist at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, a research group. “Many countries may follow us — but hopefully not at the same speed or with the same number of cases that we are facing.”
The median age of sufferers has dropped to around 37 from 60. Asymptomatic cases account for more than 50 percent of positive results, which is partly because of a fourfold rise in testing. And the health institutions feel much better prepared.
Epidemiologists aren’t certain why it arrived so soon.
Explanations include a rise in large family gatherings; the return of tourism in cities like Málaga; the decision to return responsibility for combating the virus to local authorities at the end of the nationwide lockdown; and a lack of adequate housing and health care for migrants. The surge has also been blamed on the revival of nightlife, which was reinstated earlier and with looser restrictions than in many other parts of Europe.
Greece, which has experienced a spike itself in cases, issued on Friday a new directive temporary suspending all passenger flights to the Catalonia region in Spain.
Health care workers with Covid-19 may be going undiagnosed, according to a C.D.C. report.
Despite being at high risk for developing Covid-19, a large number of doctors, nurses and other health care workers may be going undiagnosed after they become infected, according to a new report released on Monday by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings raise concern that these health care workers could unknowingly spread the infection within the hospital.
The report also found that workers who said they always wore a face covering, like a surgical mask or N95 respirator, when caring for patients had significantly lower rates of infection. However, many of these frontline workers reported shortages of personal protective equipment, and those workers also had higher rates of infection, according to the report.
Health care workers, particularly nurses, have raised concerns for months about not being protected adequately. The findings underscore the importance of regularly testing hospital employees for the virus and ensuring they are protected when they come into contact with patients. “Universal use of face coverings and lowering clinical thresholds for testing could be important strategies for reducing hospital transmission,” the researchers said.
The researchers looked at the results of antibody tests for 3,248 workers. Serum specimens were collected from early April to mid-June from frontline workers at 13 medical centers across the United States, including in California, Ohio, Maryland, New York and Tennessee.
About 6 percent of the workers had antibody evidence of a previous coronavirus infection, the report said, and more than two-thirds of these individuals had not been previously diagnosed. Almost 30 percent were asymptomatic.
The findings suggest that some infections “are undetected and unrecognized,” possibly because some workers are asymptomatic or those with symptoms are not reporting them or being tested, the researchers said.
Workers who reported that they did not always wear a face covering had a 50 percent greater infection rate, according to the analysis. Some 6 percent of those who were masked had antibodies, compared with 9 percent of those who were not.
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