COVID-19 Cases Are Spiking In EUROPE Again

Three reasons why Covid cases are spiking in Europe again

It’s been a grim year for Europe, and as the new year starts, the spiking COVID-19 cases are a direct result of the hasty reopening of beaches, bars, restaurants, schools, churches, shopping centers, and public transport right at the end of last year. People disregarded safety guidelines and started meeting up in the streets, a few days before lockdown measures were still in place.

In the UK, MPs have now voted to extend the government’s furlough scheme, which was meant to help hard-hit businesses through the tough pandemic year, until June 30. Now, the UK is on track to be the country where people will experience most of the effects of the pandemic – often heavier restrictions are likely than that of most of the continent, with strict lockdown measures in place, as we are seeing across the country.

Today, it was reported that the over 70s will receive the vaccine on February 23, 2021. That is good news for so many people across the whole of Europe – good news for us health workers on our way back to recovery.

You can read the full story below, but below is a statement from Mike Willis, Global Head of Safety for Control4Conse Ltd, a global leader in medical software development and emergency readiness:

 NHS, the organization responsible for managing health in Europe, the World Health Organization, and governments need to think long and hard about what’s happening in the hospital system while ensuring the safety of hospitals for all – both staff and patients. There is no agreement to fix this or how to ensure it, and countries across Europe are scrambling to implement their own national approaches for reopening hospitals.

NHS Europe has done some remarkable work bringing the ‘normal’ Covid-19 tests within the organizations and staff of Europe’s hospitals. But their focus must stay on workplace safety, improving hygiene, reducing pollution, and significantly increasing the use of secure electronic health record systems. Many hospitals are now communicating this information via mobile apps. For instance, a movement of UK patients had been made by a system that is secure, providing personal patient details, protocols, and diagnoses for 485 hospitals – 2,800,000 patients were handled via ‘Digital Pulse.’ It can also create readmissions for hospitals in its network.

NHS Europe is deploying an initiative that will lead to an updated ‘Hazard Report Generator’ that will allow the measurement of critical risks around hospitals – those areas that have the highest risk. This should lead to greater protection for many hospitals throughout Europe and free up time for the NHS to focus on larger issues.

 hospitals need to understand that having 10,000 positive tests in a hospital is one. Doctors, care workers, politicians, senior managers, senior doctors, senior business people, healthcare administrators, and other clinicians need to understand that healthcare workers must take each of their patients seriously because they may be the most critical. They need to identify problems and take action to ensure they are looking after each patient, each patient individually.

Some hospitals, that sit on a hospital miles from each other, have a team of specialists that work together to review the case of a patient with a weak immune system, for instance. They only get to see that the patient has an infection, but they do not see their symptoms until day 7 after the patient has had Covid-19. Likewise, they do not see their symptoms till day 40 – they need to quickly get a diagnostic report on each case. So what this means is, 90% of the potential impact of the virus is missed early, before anyone gets ill.

Border managers in the UK have been working hard to open beaches and restaurants with restrictions, but this does not mean that European jurisdictions have banned travel from England. There is only a very limited amount of travel right now in most territories, with some countries like Germany and France making it more difficult for people to travel to the UK from the UK. This has caused a huge flux of traffic in the UK over the past couple of days, where we are already seeing 40% more people moving from the UK into the EU compared to the number of traffic across the Channel, in France, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Slovenia, Sweden, Germany, Turkey, and the Netherlands. So, people are probably stopping their flights.

This flow, including some of the beaches and restaurants of the UK, will create a smaller impact. But when we put across the important message that if you are traveling to your own country in Europe, you need to also follow the strict same rules that the UK needs to follow when you are traveling into Europe, this will drive up the amount of traffic on an already busy road.

Despite all these tough times in the UK, businesses are already expecting to open.