Santa won’t be getting his traditional welcome in the Dutch city of Utrecht this year. The ceremonial head of Carnival celebrations in Germany’s Cologne had to bow out because he tested positive for Covid-19. And Austria is planning a lockdown on unvaccinated people in two hard-hit regions.

Nearly two years into a global health crisis that has killed more than five million people, infections are again sweeping across parts of Western Europe, a region with relatively high vaccination rates and good health care systems but where lockdown measures are largely a thing of the past.

The World Health Organisation said coronavirus deaths rose by 10 per cent in Europe in the past week, and an agency official declared last week that the continent was “back at the epicentre of the pandemic.”

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