Europe tightens restrictions to contain Covid-19 outbreaks

France requires from this Saturday a negative covid test of the last 24 hours to all unvaccinated people from The United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece and the Netherlands, in addition to including Cuba, Indonesia, Mozambique and Tunisia on their “red” list of countries at risk of pandemic .

In this country, nearly 114,000 people demonstrated this Saturday in different cities, according to the Ministry of the Interior, to protest against the imposition of compulsory vaccinations on certain professionals or a health certificate to access most public places from August.

The Delta variant disrupted plans in many European countries, which had relaxed anticovid measures and hoped for a summer of gradual normalcy thanks to the rapid advance of vaccination across much of the continent.

This Saturday, European Union officials claimed to have overtaken the United States in the percentage of the population who received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine.

“We promised and we did it”, declared Thierry Breton, head of the internal market of the European Commission, widely criticized at the beginning of the year for the slowness of the deployment of the vaccination campaign.

But infections are on the rise again and another outbreak of this pandemic is expected, which has already claimed more than 4 million lives worldwide.

Spain, for example, is seeing an accelerated growth in infections, especially among young people who have not yet been vaccinated, and has around 8 million citizens under curfews.

The dead, However, they remain low thanks to the high vaccination rates, which were celebrated this Saturday by the head of government Pedro Sánchez. “Next week, one in two Spaniards will have the full guideline,” he said at a ceremony for his socialist party.

The European Disease Control Agency (ECDC) expects the pandemic to rebound strongly to five times the number of new cases by August 1. However, he estimates that the number of hospitalizations and deaths will not increase as much.