Europe should brace for second wave of pandemic, says EU coronavirus chief

12:56 • 21.05.20
Coronavirus

The prospect of a second wave of coronavirus infection across Europe is no longer a distant theory, according to the director of the EU agency responsible for advising governments – including the UK – on disease control.

“The question is when and how big, that is the question in my view,” said Dr Andrea Ammon, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), according to The Guardian.

It has been the unenviable task of scientists to tell it as it is through the coronavirus pandemic. While politicians have been caught offering empty reassurances, the epidemiologists, a job title new to many, have emerged as the straight shooters of the crisis, sometimes to their detriment.

And Ammon, a former adviser to the German government, speaks frankly in her first interview with a UK newspaper since the crisis began.

“Looking at the characteristics of the virus, looking at what now emerges from the different countries in terms of population immunity – which isn’t all that exciting, between 2% and 14%, that leaves still 85% to 90% of the population susceptible – the virus is around us, circulating much more than January and February … I don’t want to draw a doomsday picture but I think we have to be realistic. That it’s not the time now to completely relax.”

Earlier this month the former hospital doctor, who worked through the various levels of healthcare bureaucracy to be become ECDC director in 2017, announced that, as of 2 May, Europe as a whole had passed the peak of infections. Only Poland was technically not yet there, she said.

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