The Third Wave: Coronavirus Mutants Are Spreading Fast

We can’t take it anymore, raged Sonja Ultsch in a video on Facebook last week. “We’ve already let them slap us on the left cheek for Ischgl, now we have to turn our right cheek, too!” It was a reference to the Austrian ski town that was responsible for one of the biggest outbreaks of the novel coronavirus in Europe during the first wave last year.

As if in a commercial for pleasant skiing holidays, the hotelier filmed herself against a sunlit Alpine backdrop, railing against the Austrian government’s efforts to seal off Tyrol because of a major outbreak of the South African B.1.351 virus mutant in the region. “I’ve had it, let them lock us in!” Ultsch railed, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses along with pink lipstick and light blond hair. “But then we’re going to open everything here!”

The defiant video went viral, and Ultsch certainly spoke from the heart of many a Tyrolean. And not only them. There is probably no country in the world where people aren’t fed up with the lockdown, which has transformed from an emergency measure to an entire new way of being. The frustration and suffering is growing louder because of the pandemic’s depressing and seemingly nonstop reign.

And ever since the virus mutants began spreading around the globe, even the last motivation for bravery is fading: the hope that the nightmare will soon end thanks to vaccination. Because as incredibly fast as it was possible to find and produce vaccines, the mutants were faster. And they are still faster.

For physicist and mathematician Michael Meyer-Hermann of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Braunschweig, one thing is clear: “Vaccination isn’t going to help us slow down the momentum of infections until the younger population has been immunized.” And what about higher temperatures in the spring and summer? It might help a bit, Meyer-Hermann thinks, when people start spending more time outside. “But that alone will in no way suffice.”