SOAVE, Italy – In separate and forceful warnings, two of the top leaders of European countries warned their citizens that the world needs to adapt to live with the COVID-19 coronavirus and cannot wait to be saved by the development of a vaccine.
Comments by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Italian counterpart Giuseppe Conte come as countries around the world and states in the United States try to reactivate their economies blindly amid the pandemic.
With 36 million recently unemployed people in the United States alone, economic pressure increases even as authorities acknowledge the risks of triggering new waves of infection and death from a virus for which people have no immunity.
Britain and Italy record the highest number of deaths in the world after the United States.
Pressured by regional leaders and weeks before set dates, Conte allowed restaurants, bars and beaches to open tomorrow, Monday, the same day that church services resume.
“We are facing calculated risks, aware … that the epidemiological curve may rise again,” Conte said Saturday.
However, Conte added that Italy “cannot” wait until a vaccine is developed, which according to health experts, would take months, if not years, for any to emerge, despite the gold rush that has emerged to create it.
“We would already encounter extensive social and productive damage by then,” he said.
For his part, the British Prime Minister, who was hospitalized for COVID-19 last month, speculated that a vaccine may never be developed.
“I said we would throw everything away to try to find a vaccine,” Boris Johnson wrote in the Sunday newspaper “Mail” on Sunday.
“There is a very long way to go and I must be frank that it may not be completed,” he added.
Johnson said his country was beginning to take “baby steps” to reopen, trying to do something that had never been done before – moving his country out of a “lockdown.”
“Despite these efforts, we have to accept that we may need to live with this virus for a time,” he said.
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