Italy began to enter strict regional lockdowns on Monday, as the government moved to halt an increase in coronavirus infections.
A year after Italy became the first European country to impose a national lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus, the nation has fallen eerily quiet once again, with new restrictions imposed on Monday in an effort to stop a third wave of infections that is threatening to wash over Europe and overwhelm its halting mass inoculation program.
As he explained the measures on Friday, Prime Minister Mario Draghi warned that Italy was facing a “new wave of contagion,” driven by more infectious variants of the coronavirus.
Just as before, Italy was not alone.
“We have clear signs: The third wave in Germany has already begun,” Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases, said during a news conference on Friday. Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary predicted that this week would be the most difficult since the start of the pandemic in terms of allocating hospital beds and breathing machines, as well as mobilizing nurses and doctors.
Hospitalizations in France are at their highest levels since November, prompting the authorities to consider a third national lockdown.
Officials in the United States are watching those developments with wary eyes. At a White House news briefing on Monday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pleaded with Americans not to let their guard down as case numbers have dropped from their peak. She pointed to images of young people crowded onto Florida beaches, though generally people are safer outside than inside, and to European nations as a warning.
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