SOAVE, Italy (AP) — In separate, stark warnings, two major European leaders bluntly told their citizens that the world needs to adapt to living with the coronavirus and cannot wait to be saved by the development of a vaccine.
The comments by Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came as governments worldwide and many U.S. states struggled with restarting economies blindsided by the pandemic. With 36 million newly unemployed in the U.S. alone, economic pressures are building even as authorities acknowledge that reopening risks setting off new waves of infections and deaths.
Pushed hard by Italy’s regional leaders and weeks in advance of an earlier timetable, Conte is allowing restaurants, bars and beach facilities to open Monday, the same day that church services can resume and shops reopen.
”We are facing a calculated risk, in the awareness … that the epidemiological curve could go back up,” Conte said. “We are confronting this risk, and we need to accept it, otherwise we would never be able to relaunch.”
Conte added that Italy could “not afford” to wait until a vaccine was developed. Health experts say the world could be months, if not years, away from having a vaccine available to everyone despite the scientific gold rush now on to create one.
Britain’s Johnson, who was hospitalized last month with a serious bout of COVID-19, speculated Sunday that a vaccine may not be developed at all, despite the huge global effort to produce one.
“I said we would throw everything we could at finding a vaccine,” Johnson wrote in the Mail on Sunday newspaper. “There remains a very long way to go, and I must be frank that a vaccine might not come to fruition.”
Coronavirus has infected over 4.6 million people and killed more than 312,000 worldwide, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University that experts say under counts the true toll of the pandemic. The U.S. has reported over 88,000 dead and Europe has seen at least 160,000 deaths.
In the U.S., many states have lifted stay-at home-orders and other restrictions, allowing some types of businesses to reopen.
Houses of worship are beginning to look ahead to resumption of in-person services, with some eyeing that shift this month. But the challenges of reopening the door to in-person worship are steeper in states with ongoing public health restrictions.
Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told “Fox News Sunday” that the virus can spread “explosively” if lockdown restrictions are lifted too quickly.
“That’s why we have to be so careful,” Frieden said. “We’re all tired of waiting at home. We want to get out. I want to get back to the gym. We want to get back to our lives.”
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