The Italian port city of Trieste last month became the epicenter of protests against the government’s new health pass. It is now home to a Covid outbreak linked directly to those protests that threatens to burden intensive care units, with an unvaccinated minority endangering public health.
Italy’s measures, which went into effect Oct. 15, require proof of vaccination, a negative test or recent Covid recovery to go to work. Though protests have died down elsewhere in the country, Trieste has developed a reputation as a center of vaccine skepticism, prompting a ban on demonstrations. The region’s president put it bluntly: “It is the moment to say with clarity: Enough idiocy.”
Last week, new cases in the city of 200,000 doubled from the week before, to more than 800. Covid patients have taken up about 18 percent of the region’s intensive care beds. Trieste’s top law enforcement official said that the current outbreak was “strictly correlated” to the protests.
Divides: In Germany, an increase in cases and hospitalizations has led the health minister, Jens Spahn, to warn of “a pandemic mainly among the unvaccinated, and it is massive.”
Pandemic resurgence: Europe is experiencing near-record levels of coronavirus infections, with 1.8 million new cases and about 24,000 deaths in the past week. “Europe is back at the epicenter of the pandemic — where we were one year ago,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, the W.H.O.’s director for Europe.
New York Times