- A new study looks at how the United States and countries in the European Union handled the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Researchers said the U.S. government did not mandate restrictions on states while the European Union did not have the authority to require restrictions on individual countries.
- Experts say the United States and Europe instituted different types of lockdowns. They also note the politics in the United States is more divisive than in Europe.
The COVID-19 pandemic has held the world in its grip, killing more than 4.4 million people worldwide, including more than 625,000 in the United States and nearly 750,000 in European Union countries.
However, responses to the pandemic differ within the European Union (EU) member states almost as much as they have within individual states in America, according to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.
“The complex politics of public health at the EU level have led to the fragmentation of its governance for effective pandemic responses,” the report reads. “This ongoing pandemic has shed light on the fragility of the political and structural systems in Europe in public health emergencies.”
Compared to the United States, many EU member states enforced more comprehensive lockdowns, which were initially effective, said Hannah Sally, MSc, a senior epidemiologist at Informa Pharma Intelligence in the United Kingdom.
“Country-wide lockdowns were much stricter than varying levels of ‘stay at home orders’ issued by states in the U.S., which were effective at reducing the number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths,” Sally told Healthline.
“But, they weren’t sustainable in the long term, and once lifted, infection levels rose again,” she said. “There are also many border restrictions in place, which are effective in controlling and preventing the introduction of new variants into countries. But it seems that the lack of uniform border control rules across countries globally has meant the Delta variant has still managed to spread across the world.”
Even with this knowledge, some EU countries such as Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands were slow to impose lockdowns and other containments, much like some states in the United States.
Much like the United States, as European countries began to reopen their borders, case rates began surging again, especially when coinciding with many citizens’ summer holidays.
Source: healthline