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Corona crisis: what makes a second wave so dangerous

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The Chancellor’s warning was impressive. “We mustn’t weigh ourselves a second in safety,” Angela Merkel explained on Monday. In Germany, the first easing came into force after weeks of restrictions in the corona crisis. “It would be a shame if we had a relapse of sight,” said Merkel.

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The country is currently trying to cautiously return to normal. It is clear that if the number of infections rises sharply again, a new shutdown would be inevitable. “If we all continue to pretend that the problem has been overcome, we will have an outbreak again. That’s pretty certain,” said Lars Schaade, Vice President of the Robert Koch Institute, on Tuesday. If the number of cases increases massively in the future, “the health system can still be overloaded very quickly” (more on bed capacity read here).

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It is not yet clear whether, when and how strongly a second corona wave will occur. Many aspects play a role here, for example the question of whether there will be a weakening of the infection process due to higher temperatures in the summer months. It is tricky that you may only see the wave when it is already there. This has to do with the fact that new cases only appear in the statistics after over a week or even longer due to the incubation period and the delay in reporting.

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The virologist Christian Drosten from the Charité in Berlin has recently describedwhy a second wave could be significantly more problematic than the first. At the start of the pandemic in Germany, the cases were very unevenly distributed. Areas severely affected, in which the pathogen is affected by Carnival sessions, Strong beer festivals or returning ski vacationers had spread above average, so far contrasted many parts of the country where the problem was far from being so massive.

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If the infections flare up again, according to Drosten, this should change – because the pathogen is currently spreading under the blanket of the current restrictions, just slowly. “Suddenly you have a wave of infection within a month that you didn’t expect,” said the virologist. Even if the reproductive factor had been kept around 1 by then (this means that one person with Covid 19 infects one healthy person at a time), the consequences could be drastic.

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Chancellor Merkel recently calculated that if the reproductive factor rose to 1.3, intensive care units would be overcrowded in June. If the factor were only 1.1, this would still be the case in autumn. What made him “somewhat worried”, said the virologist Drosten, was the fact that the intensive care beds at the Charité were also gradually filling up – although there had never been “a situation of very high transmission in Berlin”. This could play a role in the fact that patients with severe courses of Covid-19 sometimes need intensive care for weeks, so the beds are occupied for a long time.

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Chief of the US epizootic agency also warns

“We are still at the beginning of the pandemic, many forget that,” virologist Melanie Brinkmann from the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Braunschweig also told SPIEGEL. “The government has now sent the wrong signal with the easing and I fear that many will no longer take the virus so seriously and make more contacts again.” If that happens, Germany will soon be back where it started, warns Brinkmann.

Concern about the second wave is also growing in the USA. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC epidemic, fears that an increased return of the pathogen could coincide with the upcoming flu season. “There is a possibility that the virus’s attack on our nation next winter will be even more difficult than the one we have just experienced,” Redfield said in a conversation with the “Washington Post”. The government agencies in Washington and the states should use the time until then to prepare. This affects not only the expansion of test capacities and the ability to track the contacts of infected people – but also the need to explain to people that they must continue to abide by contact and distance rules.

Also in the “Washigton Post” A historical view of the dangers of a second wave was found some time ago. Specifically, it is about the city of Denver at the time of the Spanish flu 102 years ago. After the appearance of the first cases at the end of September 1918, strict disease protection rules were introduced a week later. Pleasing results emerged after ten days, after which the restrictions on November 11 were withdrawn. The number of diseases then rose again.

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In fact, in the second wave in Denver there were not only around 50 percent more infections per head of the total population, the duration of the infection in the city was also significantly longer. In cities such as Kansas City, Milwaukee and St. Louis, the return of the disease was more deadly than its first appearance.

In connection with Covid-19, this should make you think. How the disease can return can currently be seen in the meantime flagship corona in Singapore. From just a handful of new infections a day in early March are now partly become significantly more than 1000. Foreign workers in their narrow mass accommodation are particularly affected. The problem: At the beginning of the outbreak in Singapore, the infection routes were still understandable, but this is hardly the case now. The outbreak threatens to get out of control.

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In New Zealand, on the other hand, you don’t want to experience a second wave of illnesses. The comparatively sparsely populated country has undertaken not only to curb the spread of the pathogen Sars-CoV-2, but to stop it completely. The virus has “no superpowers,” said vaccine researcher Helen Petousis-Harris of the University of Auckland the news agency AP. “As soon as the transmission is stopped, it’s gone.”

This has already been achieved in at least one place in the world. The Arctic island of Greenland reports that it is currently there zero corona cases gives.

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