The Irish Times view on Covid-19 in Europe: the receding wave

Although Covid-19 cases remain high across Europe, the broad outlook is positive and most governments are taking the opportunity to restore the personal freedoms they were forced to curtail during the worst of the health crisis. Sweden this week followed its Nordic neighbours Denmark and Norway by lifting almost all of its Covid restrictions. France, Portugal and Greece have all announced plans to drop a negative test requirement for entry, while Poland is easing isolation and quarantine requirements. It is "the beginning of the end of the pandemic", said the country's health minister, Adam Niedzielski.

That's premature, but the situation is stabilising and there is no doubt that some of the key indicators are encouraging. The World Health Organisation (WHO) reported on Wednesday that overall case counts fell 17 per cent worldwide over the last week compared to the previous week. That included a 50 per cent drop in the United States, which has been ravaged by the disease. While the official numbers dramatically undercount the true extent of infections, not least because some countries, including Ireland, have eased their PCR testing requirements, the fall in confirmed cases is significant. Vaccination rates are increasing steadily, and the dominance of the more transmissible but apparently less severe Omicron variant, which now accounts for the vast bulk of cases across the globe, has helped to weaken the link between infection and hospitalisation or death.

Against that background, where pressure on hospitals is easing and the situation is improving, governments are right to lift extraordinary public health restrictions. To retain strict curbs on people’s lives at a time like this would make it more difficult to secure public buy-in for any future restrictions that might be required. But the risk from new variants remains, and there is no guarantee that the worst of the pandemic has passed. It follows that states should use the current calm to ensure they are prepared – for example, with testing and genomic sequencing capacity, and with enough medical equipment – for any resurgence.