Italy and France are witnessing another wave of COVID-19 infections probably caused by the spread of the UK B.1.1.7 variant and the only realistic solution is to massively increase the daily vaccination rate, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Bishal Bhandari, PhD, Senior Epidemiologist at GlobalData, comments: “France and Italy had their COVID-19 situation under control until December. However, the situation in France gradually deteriorated, with the number of daily new cases remaining high despite a range of mitigation measures being implemented. Across the border, Italy is also reporting a rise in COVID-19 daily new cases in recent days. Unfortunately, continuing strict lockdown seems inevitable as the vaccination rate in these countries is very low to counteract the increasing dominance of this variant.”

The French government has stated that almost half of the country’s daily new cases were the UK SARS-CoV-2 variant, B.1.1.7, which caused the UK to report a high number of cases and placed UK hospitals under extreme strain with very high death tolls.

Bhandari continues: “France and Italy are now reporting 300 cases per million population, which is three times higher than the UK. If this trajectory in the number of COVID-19 daily confirmed cases continues, France and Italy could be in a similar situation to where the UK was in January 2021.”

The B.1.1.7 variant is at least 50% more transmissible than the non-variant strains. However, existing vaccines seem to be efficacious for this variant, which is a positive news for the European countries.

Vaccine rollout has also been a major issue in Europe, with the pace of vaccination much slower compared to the US and the UK. Furthermore, there have been reports of a high degree of vaccine scepticism in France, which needs to be countered with effective public health promotion.

Bhandari concludes: “The best course of action now is to get vaccines into as many people as quickly as possible. Mitigation measures to control the number of new cases need to continue until most of the population is vaccinated.”