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European Governments Drafting 'Pandemic' Contingency Plans

Jamie Dettmer

   ROME - European governments are readying plans for coping with a
   possible coronavirus pandemic, despite the fact that the numbers of
   COVID-19 cases are still small in Europe compared to Asia.

   Officials in several counties admit that they expect the novel virus,
   which has infected at least 80,000 people worldwide and killed nearly
   3000, to spread and say they are developing plans to cancel sporting
   events and concerts, reduce public transport services, impose travel
   restrictions and shutter schools.

   European Union leaders are still hopeful that member states will
   refrain from imposing border controls within the Schengen area of
   visa-free travel, but they acknowledge that the scale of the public
   health crisis will most likely determine the reaction of national
   governments.

   Some public health experts say the time is right to start planning for
   a pandemic -- they suspect there are far more cases in Europe than are
   known.

   Britain's health service is planning to increase testing for COVID-19
   and has directed more than one hundred family surgeries and a dozen
   hospitals to start more testing, even for people who have not traveled
   to high-risk countries and aren't displaying any symptoms of the
   illness. The service says the testing is a bid to establish whether
   coronavirus is spreading in Britain despite containment efforts. There
   have been 13 reported cases of COVID-19 in Britain so far.

   Health officials said that it would "not be wholly unexpected" if the
   tests found new cases. Britain's Sun newspaper reported Wednesday that
   the British government fears 80% of the country's population could
   contract the virus, if a pandemic does develop. The newspaper quoted
   from a government report called "COVID-19 Reasonable Worst Case
   Scenario."

   "The current planning assumption is that 2-3% of symptomatic cases will
   result in a fatality," government officials said in the report.
   According to the government forecasters infection rates would snowball
   for two to three months once the virus starts spreading.

   A British government spokesman told the newspaper all eventualities had
   to be planned for, but added, "this does not mean we expect it to
   happen."

   With Italy emerging as a new hub for the virus, many neighboring
   countries say they have little option but to plan for an outbreak, if
   prevention and containment fails to halt contagion. Health ministers
   from France, Germany, Italy and the EU Commission committed to keeping
   frontiers open at a meeting Tuesday as new cases of the virus emerged
   throughout Europe.

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