Germany is dealing with a coronavirus surge that might be a warning for what’s to come to the United States in the next few months.
Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday the country’s latest coronavirus surge “is worse than anything Germany has experienced so far,” Bloomberg News reports.
- “We are in a highly dramatic situation. What is in place now is not sufficient,” Merkel told leaders of her political party, according to CNBC.
- The fourth wave is “hitting our country with full force,” she added, per CNN.
Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister, said the new COVID-19 spike is going to infect anyone who is unvaccinated — and lead to more deaths, per Bloomberg.
- “Just about everyone in Germany will probably be either vaccinated, recovered or dead,” Spahn said.
Earlier this month, Germany — a country originally seen as a poster child for dealing with the coronavirus — started seeing signs of a new coronavirus spike, likely tied to the delta variant, as I wrote for the Deseret News.
Olaf Scholz, Germany’s potential new chancellor, called for more people to get vaccinated to slow the spread, Reuters reported.
Germany isn’t alone, though. Multiple European nations are facing a coronavirus outbreak right now. For example, Austria has gone into lockdown over the COVID-19 surge.
- Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist and biostatistician at KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, said this could be “a sign that the U.S. might still see resurgences, as well.”
Back stateside, Dr. Anthony Fauci director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that there could be another COVID-19 surge if more people don’t get vaccinated.
- “We still have about 60 million people in this country who are eligible to be vaccinated who have not been, and that results in the dynamic of virus in the community that not only is dangerous and makes people who are unvaccinated vulnerable, but it also spills over into the vaccinated people,” he said.
- “We have a lot of virus circulating around. You can’t walk away from the data, and the data show that the cases are starting to go up, which is not unexpected when you get into a winter season. People start to go indoors more and we know that immunity does wane over time,” he added.