Belgium has call on its population to start working from home again due to surging Covid infections, with Europe once again at the centre of pandemic’s fourth wave.
“We have to implement measures … especially tele-working, from Monday [8 November],” Belgian health minister Frank Vandenbroucke said on local radio broadcaster de Ochtend on Friday. “We must act now … if this surge continues we will exceed the critical number of 500 people in intensive care, by all accounts a terrible scenario. “We underestimated the infectiousness of the Delta variant [of Covid],” he also said, citing figures of 1,900 Covid patients in Belgian hospitals, 360 of whom were already in intensive care.
“We must limit the number of close contacts,” Vandenbroucke said.
New restrictions were also introduced in Austria. The Central European country banned unvaccinated people were banned from cafes, cinemas, restaurants, and hairdressers in Austria from next week, as infections broke records set a year ago, including 9,943 new cases within a 24 hour period on Saturday, surpassing the previous worst day of 13 November 2020, when 9,586 cases were logged.
“The evolution is exceptional and the occupancies of intensive-care beds are increasing significantly faster than we had expected,” Austrian chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said Friday.
