Tokyo Olympics rescheduled for July 23-Aug. 8 in 2021

March 30, 2020

TOKYO (AP) — The Tokyo Olympics will open next year in the same time slot scheduled for this year's games. Tokyo organizers said Monday the opening ceremony will take place on July 23, 2021 — almost exactly one year after the games were due to start this year.

“The schedule for the games is key to preparing for the games," Tokyo organizing committee president Yoshiro Mori said. “This will only accelerate our progress.” Last week, the IOC and Japanese organizers postponed the Olympics until 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This year's games were scheduled to open on July 24 and close on Aug. 9. But the near exact one-year delay will see the rescheduled closing ceremony on Aug. 8. There had been talk of switching the Olympics to spring, a move that would coincide with the blooming of Japan's famous cherry blossoms. But it would also clash with European soccer and North American sports leagues.

Mori said a spring Olympics was considered but holding the games later gives more space to complete the many qualifying events that have been postponed by the virus outbreak. “We wanted to have more room for the athletes to qualify,” Mori said.

After holding out for weeks, local organizers and the IOC last week postponed the Tokyo Games under pressure from athletes, national Olympic bodies and sports federations. It's the first postponement in Olympic history, though there were several cancellations during wartime.

The Paralympics were rescheduled to Aug. 24-Sept. 5. The new Olympic dates would conflict with the scheduled world championships in track and swimming, but those events are now expected to also be pushed back.

“The IOC has had close discussions with the relevant international federations," organizing committee CEO Toshiro Muto said. "I believe the IFs have accepted the games being held in the summer.” Muto said the decision was made Monday and the IOC said it was supported by all the international sports federations and was based on three main considerations: to protect the health of athletes, to safeguard the interests of the athletes and Olympic sport, and the international sports calendar.

“These new dates give the health authorities and all involved in the organisation of the Games the maximum time to deal with the constantly changing landscape and the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” the IOC said. “The new dates ... also have the added benefit that any disruption that the postponement will cause to the international sports calendar can be kept to a minimum, in the interests of the athletes and the IFs.”

Both Mori and Muto have said the cost of rescheduling the Olympics will be “massive” — local reports estimate billions of dollars — with most of the expenses borne by Japanese taxpayers. Muto promised transparency in calculating the costs, and testing times deciding how they are divided up.

“Since it (the Olympics) were scheduled for this summer, all the venues had given up hosting any other events during this time, so how do we approach that?” Muto asked. "In addition, there will need to be guarantees when we book the new dates, and there is a possibility this will incur rent payments. So there will be costs incurred and we will need to consider them one by one. I think that will be the tougher process.”

Katsuhiro Miyamoto, an emeritus professor of sports economics at Kansai University, puts the costs as high as $4 billion. That would cover the price of maintaining stadiums, refitting them, paying rentals, penalties and other expenses.

Japan is officially spending $12.6 billion to organize the Olympics. However, an audit bureau of the Japanese government says the costs are twice that much. All of the spending is public money except $5.6 billion from a privately funded operating budget.

The Switzerland-based International Olympic Committee is contributing $1.3 billion, according to organizing committee documents. The IOC's contribution goes into the operating budget. IOC President Thomas Bach has repeatedly called the Tokyo Olympics the best prepared in history. However, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso also termed them “cursed.” Aso competed in shooting in the 1976 Olympics, and was born in 1940.

The Olympics planned for 1940 in Tokyo were canceled because of World War II. The run-up to the Olympics also saw IOC member Tsunekazu Takeda, who also headed the Japanese Olympic Committee, forced to resign last year amid a bribery scandal.

New Zealand embraces teddies to help make lockdown bear-able

April 02, 2020

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Some are perched in trees. Some are hanging upside down. Some are baking scones. Teddy bears are popping up in the unlikeliest of places as New Zealanders embrace an international movement in which people are placing the stuffed animals in their windows during coronavirus lockdowns to brighten the mood and give children a game to play by spotting the bears in their neighborhoods.

The inspiration comes from the children's book “We're Going on a Bear Hunt,” written by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. New Zealand last week began a four-week lockdown but people are still allowed outside to exercise if they keep a safe distance from each other. In other words, bear-spotting is okay.

Mother-of-two and part-time school administrator Deb Hoffman started the Facebook page "We're Not Scared - NZ Bear Hunt" and also set up a website where more than 120,000 people have now put pins on an online map to show the location of their bears. “We're not scared” is a repeated line in the book, which features a family overcoming a number of obstacles in their search for a bear.

Hoffman said she's been taken aback by the huge response. She said some people are creating personalities for their bears by having them do a different activity each day. Hoffman said one woman wrote that the teddy bears were the only thing getting her through the isolation, after she had already been housebound for six weeks following surgery before the lockdown began.

“It's a way for people to feel connected, and to contribute,” Hoffman said. “It's really important at a time like this.” Hoffman said she's getting some help to enhance her website so that people will soon be able to interact with the bears by giving them an emotion.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has even joined in, saying people should keep an eye on her window because they might spot a bear. In a grimly ironic twist, the author of the book is hospitalized with symptoms similar to COVID-19.

Rosen’s family said Tuesday that the 73-year-old writer was “poorly” but improving, having previously spent a night in intensive care. Rosen’s wife Emma-Louise Williams tweeted: “He has been able to eat today & will be getting a more comfortable oxygen mask soon. All good signs.”

She did not say whether Rosen had been diagnosed with the new coronavirus. In recent weeks, Rosen has described his illness on Twitter, wondering whether symptoms including fatigue and fever meant he had COVID-19 or a “heavy flu.”

NATO says its role not hit by virus as Russia drills troops

April 01, 2020

BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday that the organization’s security capabilities have not been diminished by the coronavirus, amid suspicion that Russia might try to use the impact of disease to probe the military alliance’s defenses.

NATO acknowledges that cases of the disease have surfaced among personnel deployed near Russia’s border as well as in its training operation in Afghanistan. Wargames have been scaled down and the coronavirus has forced the 30-country alliance to cut staffing and meetings at its Brussels headquarters.

Russia, meanwhile, has been conducting drills that its defense ministry says are aimed at checking troop readiness to deal with any contagion. Britain’s navy said last week that its vessels had been shadowing Russian warships “after unusually high levels of activity in the English Channel and North Sea.”

“We of course see significant military activities close to NATO borders with a new exercise in the western military district of Russia,” Stoltenberg told reporters. “We have seen significant Russian presence in the North Sea.”

“We have made some adjustments to exercises. We have cancelled some exercises, we have adjusted other exercises, but that doesn’t undermine our operational readiness. We continue to patrol the skies and defend our borders and continue our missions and operations,” he said.

Stoltenberg’s remarks came on the eve of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, to be held by secure video-conference for the first time in the U.S.-led organization’s 70-year history, where the impact of the coronavirus will dominate discussion.

While the disease is hitting all its member countries and could yet raise security concerns, NATO itself has no front-line role to play against its spread, apart from coordinating and supporting national efforts with logistical, transport and communications help.

UK's Johnson under fire for low number of COVID-19 tests

April 01, 2020

LONDON (AP) — When Prime Minister Boris Johnson developed a cough and fever, he got a test for the new coronavirus. Most other Britons won’t be offered one. Johnson’s Conservative government was under fire Wednesday for failing to keep its promise to increase the amount of testing being done for COVID-19, even as the country saw its biggest day-to-day rise yet in deaths among people with the virus, to 2,352.

The issue has become an incipient political crisis for Johnson, who has mild symptoms and is working from isolation in the prime minister’s Downing Street apartment. Richard Horton, editor of medical journal The Lancet, said Britain’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis was “the most serious science policy failure in a generation.”

In a tweet, he noted that England’s deputy chief medical officer said last week that “’there comes a point in a pandemic where that (testing) is not an appropriate intervention.” “Now (testing is) a priority,” Horton said. "Public message: utter confusion.”

Like some other countries, the U.K. has restricted testing to hospitalized patients, leaving people with milder symptoms unsure whether they have had the virus. Many scientists say wider testing -- especially of health care staff -- would allow medics who are off work with symptoms to return if they are negative, and would give a better picture of how the virus spreads.

Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick conceded Wednesday that “we do need to go further and we need to do that faster.” The U.K. initially performed about 5,000 tests a day, but the government promised to increase that number to 10,000 by the end of last week and to 25,000 by mid-April. The target has been elusive. On Wednesday, the government said 9,793 tests had been performed in the previous 24 hours, the highest daily total yet.

Critics contrast the U.K. with Germany, which reacted quickly as reports of the new respiratory virus emerged from China at the end of last year. It began producing a test for COVID-19 in January, weeks before the U.K. Germany now has the capacity to do 500,000 tests a week.

Jenrick said the U.K.’s test tally should hit 15,000 a day “within a couple of days” and 25,000 a day in a couple of weeks. But progress has been agonizingly slow. The government says testing front-line health care workers is a priority — however only 2,000 have been tested so far, from a National Health Service workforce of more than 1 million.

Yvonne Doyle, medical director of Public Health England, said authorities were setting up five drive-through testing centers for medical staff. “The intention here is to get from thousands to hundreds of thousands in the coming weeks," she said at a news conference.

British officials blame shortages of swabs to take samples and of chemicals known as reagents, which are needed to perform the tests, for the delay in ramping up testing. “There is a massive demand for raw materials and commercial kits -- this is not unique to the U.K. -- and many places no longer have stock of essential reagents,” said Stephen Baker, professor of molecular microbiology at the University of Cambridge.

The United States has also struggled to boost its testing capacity. A test produced by the Centers for Disease Control suffered early reliability problems and there were delays in engaging the private sector to ramp up testing capacity. U.S. testing is now growing rapidly, but varies widely from state to state.

Public health experts have estimated the U.S. should be testing between 100,000 and 150,000 patients daily to track and contain the virus. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Monday that the U.S. is testing “nearly 100,000 samples per day" and had now tested more than 1 million samples for the coronavirus. It wasn’t clear if that figure represented actual patients or samples processed.

British officials defend their record at developing and deploying a test for COVID-19. They also say that while too little testing is a weakness, so is too much, because testing vast numbers of healthy people would be wasteful.

That point was echoed by World Health Organization emergencies chief Dr. Mike Ryan, who said a ratio of 10 negative tests to one positive was “a general benchmark of a system that's doing enough testing to pick up all cases.”

In Britain, about 20% of tests have been positive, suggesting a substantial number of cases is being missed. Critics of the British government say the testing debacle is typical of its sluggish and complacent response to the pandemic.

The U.K. was slower than many European countries to implement measures such as closing schools, bars and restaurants and telling people to stay home to impede transmission of the virus. A nationwide lock-down was imposed just over a week ago.

After a decade of public spending cuts by Conservative governments, the National Health Service and other public health bodies have very little spare capacity. Jonathan Ashworth, health spokesman for the main opposition Labour Party, said health workers “are rightly asking if we've left it too late to buy the kits and chemicals we need, or whether our lab capacity is too overstretched after years of tight budgets.”

"NHS staff and carers on the front line who need these tests urgently deserve an immediate explanation from the government as to what's going on,” he said.

AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng in London and AP Health Writer Matthew Perrone in Washington contributed to this story.

'A battlefield behind your home': Deaths mount in New York

April 01, 2020

NEW YORK (AP) — New York authorities rushed to bring in an army of medical volunteers Wednesday as the statewide death toll from the coronavirus doubled in 72 hours to more than 1,900 and the wail of ambulances in the otherwise eerily quiet streets of the city became the heartbreaking soundtrack of the crisis.

As hot spots flared around the U.S. in places like New Orleans, Detroit and Southern California, the nation's biggest city was the hardest hit of them all, with bodies loaded onto refrigerated morgue trucks by gurney and forklift outside overwhelmed hospitals, in full view of passing motorists.

And the worst is yet to come. “How does it end? And people want answers," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. "I want answers. The answer is nobody knows for sure.” Across the U.S., Americans braced for what President Donald Trump warned could be “one of the roughest two or three weeks we’ve ever had in our country." The White House on Tuesday projected 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the U.S. before the crisis is over, and Vice President Mike Pence said models for the outbreak show the country on a trajectory akin to hard-hit Italy's.

Under growing pressure, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis belatedly joined Cuomo and governors in more than 30 states in issuing a statewide stay-home order, taking action after conferring with fellow Republican Trump. The governors of Pennsylvania and Nevada, both Democrats, took similar steps.

Meanwhile, European nations facing extraordinary demand for intensive-care beds are putting up makeshift hospitals, unsure whether they will find enough healthy medical staff to run them. London is just days from unveiling a 4,000-bed temporary hospital built in a huge convention center.

In a remarkable turnabout, rich economies where virus cases have exploded are welcoming help from less wealthy ones. Russia sent medical equipment and masks to the United States. Cuba supplied doctors to France. Turkey dispatched protective gear and disinfectant to Italy and Spain.

Worldwide, more than 900,000 people have been infected and over 45,000 have died, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University, though the real figures are believed to be much higher because of testing shortages, differences in counting the dead and large numbers of mild cases that have gone unreported.

The U.S. recorded about 200,000 infections and about 4,400 deaths, with New York City accounting for about 1 out of 4 dead. In New York, more than 80,000 people have volunteered as medical reinforcements, including recent retirees, health care professionals taking a break from their regular jobs and people between gigs.

Few have made it into the field yet, as authorities vet them and figure out how to use them, but hospitals are expected to begin bringing them in later this week. Those who have hit the ground already, many brought in by staffing agencies, have discovered a hospital system being pushed to the breaking point.

“It’s hard when you lose patients. It’s hard when you have to tell the family members: ‘I’m sorry, but we did everything that we could,’” said nurse Katherine Ramos, of Cape Coral, Florida, who has been working at New York Presbyterian Hospital. "It’s even harder when we really don’t have the time to mourn, the time to talk about this.”

To ease the crushing caseload, the city's paramedics have been told they shouldn’t take fatal heart attack victims to hospitals to have them pronounced dead. Patients have been transferred to the Albany area. A Navy hospital ship has docked in New York, the mammoth Javits Convention Center has been turned into a hospital, and the tennis center that hosts the U.S. Open is being converted to one, too.

With New York on near-lockdown, the normally bustling streets in the city of 8.6 million are empty, and a siren to some is no longer just urban background noise. The city's playgrounds are closing, too, at Cuomo's order.

“After 9/11, I remember we actually wanted to hear the sound of ambulances on our quiet streets because that meant there were survivors, but we didn't hear those sounds, and it was heartbreaking. Today, I hear an ambulance on my strangely quiet street and my heart breaks, too,” said 61-year-old Meg Gifford, a former Wall Streeter who lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Near severely swamped Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, resident Emma Sorza, 33, described an eerie scene. “I think everyone’s just doing what they can, but at the same time it bothers you. Especially if you’re around Elmhurst, because you can hear all the ambulances, she said. "There is a truck and people are actually dying. It’s like a battlefield behind your home.”

Cuomo said projections suggest the crisis in New York will peak at the end of April, with a high death rate continuing through July. “Let's cooperate to address that in New York because it's going to be in your town tomorrow," he warned. "If we learn how to do it right here — or learn how to do it the best we can, because there is no right, it's only the best we can — then we can work cooperatively all across this country.”

Elsewhere around the country, Florida's DeSantis was locked in a standoff over whether two cruise ships with sick and dead passengers may dock in his state. More than 300 U.S. citizens were on board. Two deaths were blamed on the virus, and nine people tested positive, Holland America cruise line said.

DeSantis, who is close to Trump, said the state's health system is stretched too thin to accommodate the passengers. But the president said he would speak with him. “They're dying on the ship,” Trump said. “I'm going to do what's right. Not only for us, but for humanity.”

In Southern California, officials reported that at least 51 residents and six staff members at a nursing home east of Los Angeles have been infected and two have died. Even as the virus has slowed its growth in overwhelmed Italy and in China, where it first emerged, hospitals on the Continent are buckling under the load.

"It feels like we are in a Third World country. We don't have enough masks, enough protective equipment, and by the end of the week we might be in need of more medication too,” said Paris emergency worker Christophe Prudhomme.

Spain hit a record of 864 deaths in one day, for a total of more than 9,000. In Italy, with over 13,000 dead, the most of any country, morgues overflowed with bodies, caskets piled up in churches, and doctors were forced to decide which desperately ill patients would get breathing machines.

England's Wimbledon tennis tournament was canceled for the first time since World War II. India’s highest court ordered news media and social media sites to carry the government’s “official version” of developments, echoing actions taken in other countries to curb independent reporting.

The strain facing some of the world's best health care systems has been aggravated by hospital budget cuts over the past decade in Italy, Spain, France and Britain. They have called in medical students, retired doctors and even laid-off flight attendants with first aid training.

The staffing shortage has been exacerbated by the high numbers of infected personnel. In Italy alone, nearly 10,000 medical workers have been infected and more than 60 doctors have died. For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. But for others, especially older adults and people with health problems, it can cause severe symptoms like pneumonia and lead to death.

China, where the outbreak began late last year, on Wednesday reported just 36 new COVID-19 cases.

Charlton reported from Paris. Sherman reported from Washington. Associated Press writers around the world contributed, including Joseph Wilson in Barcelona; Danica Kirka and Jill Lawless in London; Frank Jordans in Berlin; Karen Matthews in New York; and Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand.

Europe faces ICU crunch, rushes to build field hospitals

April 01, 2020

ROME (AP) — Facing intense surges in the need for hospital ICU beds, European nations are on a building and hiring spree, throwing together makeshift hospitals and shipping coronavirus patients out of overwhelmed cities via high-speed trains and military jets. The key question is whether they will be able to find enough healthy medical staff to make it all work.

Even as the virus has slowed its growth in overwhelmed Italy and in China, where it first emerged, hospitals in Spain and France are reaching their breaking points and the U.S. and Britain are bracing for incoming waves of desperately ill people.

"It feels like we are in a third world country. We don't have enough masks, enough protective equipment, and by the end of the week we might be in need of more medication too,” said Paris emergency worker Christophe Prudhomme.

In a remarkable turnaround, rich economies where virus cases have exploded are welcoming help from less wealthy ones. Russia sent medical equipment and masks to the U.S. on Wednesday. Cuba sent doctors to France. Turkey sent masks, hazmat suits, goggles and disinfectants to Italy and Spain.

London is just days from unveiling a 4,000-bed temporary hospital built in a massive convention center to take non-critical patients so British hospitals can keep ahead of an expected surge in demand. Still, there are concerns about finding thousands of medical workers to run it.

Spain, which hit a new record Wednesday of 864 deaths in one day, has boosted its hospital beds by 20%. Hotspots in Madrid and northeast Catalonia have almost tripled their ICU capacity. Dozens of hotels across Spain have been turned into recovery rooms, and authorities are building field hospitals in sports centers, libraries and exhibition halls.

Intensive care units are particularly crucial in a pandemic in which tens of thousands of patients descend into acute respiratory distress. Those ICU units are much harder to cobble together quickly than standard hospital beds.

Milan opened an intensive care field hospital Tuesday at the city fairgrounds, complete with a pharmacy and radiology wards. It expects to eventually employ 900 staff. The move came after the health situation turned extreme in Italy's Lombardy region, where bodies overflowed in morgues, caskets piled up in churches and doctors were forced to decide which desperately ill patient would get a breathing machine.

“We aren’t happy to have done this,” fairgrounds foundation head Enrico Pazzali said. “It's something I never would have wanted to do.” The pressure is easing on hard-hit Italian cities like Bergamo and Brescia as the rate of new infections in Italy slows. Yet many Italians are still dying at home or in nursing homes because hospitals are saturated and they could not get access to ICU breathing machines.

With over 12,400 dead so far, Italy has the most coronavirus deaths of any nation. Italy, Britain and France are among countries that have called in medical students, retired doctors and even laid-off flight attendants with first aid training to help, although all need re-training.

The medical staffing shortage has been exacerbated by the high numbers of infected personnel. In Italy alone, nearly 10,000 medical workers have been infected and more than 60 doctors have died. While Spain's confirmed infections shot past 102,000 Wednesday and its deaths are now beyond 9,000, the increase in infections was less than the previous day, offering some hope that the contagion rate is stabilizing.

Still, COVID-19 patients who need intensive care can occupy a bed for three to four weeks, meaning Spain and other nations will still see increasing pressures on their hospitals for days or weeks to come.

The Paris region more than doubled its ICU capacity over the past week – but the beds are already full. So Paris was sending critically ill patients to less-saturated regions on special high-speed trains Wednesday. Others have been moved by military planes, helicopters or warships.

One reason Germany is in better shape than other European countries is its high proportion of ICU beds, at 33.9 per 100,000 people, compared to 8.6 in Italy. Germany has 775 virus deaths, 16 times fewer deaths than Italy.

Britain still has some free ICU beds available, but the outbreak is likely weeks away from its peak there and the U.K. has one of the lowest number of hospital beds per capita in Europe. The new hospital inside London’s Excel center plans to admit its first patients at the end of this week. Chief operating officer Natalie Forrest warned that it will need thousands of doctors, nurses and volunteers.

“The numbers are scary,” she said. For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. But for others, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause severe symptoms like pneumonia and lead to death.

U.S. health authorities warned the number of dead could reach up to 240,000 even with social distancing measures in place as the New York region also rushed to set up extra hospital capacity. A 1,000-bed emergency hospital at the mammoth Javits Convention Center began taking non-coronavirus patients on Tuesday to help relieve the city's overwhelmed health system. A Navy hospital ship was expected to accept patients soon, and the indoor tennis center that hosts the U.S. Open is being turned into a hospital.

“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead,” President Donald Trump said Tuesday after he extended social distancing guidelines until April 30. “We're going to go through a very tough two weeks.”

The U.S. recorded a big daily jump of 26,000 new cases, bringing its total infections to more than 189,000, the highest in the world. The U.S. death toll leapt to over 4,000, and refrigerated morgue trucks parked on New York streets to collect the dead.

Worldwide, more than 860,000 people have been confirmed infected and over 42,000 have died, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. Italy and Spain accounted for half of all the deaths. Everywhere, the real figures are believed to be much higher due to issues in counting infections and deaths.

China, where the outbreak began late last year, on Wednesday reported just 36 new COVID-19 cases. Some people have chosen to ignore social distancing guidelines. In Louisiana, buses and cars filled a church parking lot Tuesday as worshippers flocked to hear a pastor who is facing charges for holding services despite a ban on gatherings. A few protesters also showed up at the Life Tabernacle Church, including one with a sign that read: “God don't like stupid."

Two ships carrying passengers and crew from an ill-fated South American cruise are urging Florida officials to let them dock. Four people aboard with the virus have died and nine have tested positive. Trump said, for humanitarian reasons, Florida should do so.

Charlton reported from Paris. Associated Press writers around the world contributed to this report including Joseph Wilson in Barcelona; Danica Kirka and Jill Lawless in London; Karen Matthews in New York; and Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand.

Europe's hospitals among the best but can't handle pandemic

March 31, 2020

LONDON (AP) — As increasing numbers of European hospitals buckle under the strain of tens of thousands of coronavirus patients, the crisis has exposed a surprising paradox: Some of the world’s best health systems are remarkably ill-equipped to handle a pandemic.

Outbreak experts say Europe’s hospital-centric systems, lack of epidemic experience and early complacency are partly to blame for the pandemic’s catastrophic tear across the continent. “If you have cancer, you want to be in a European hospital,” said Brice de le Vingne, who heads COVID-19 operations for Doctors Without Borders in Belgium. “But Europe hasn’t had a major outbreak in more than 100 years, and now they don’t know what to do.”

Last week, the World Health Organization scolded countries for “squandering” their chance to stop the virus from gaining a foothold, saying that countries should have reacted more aggressively two months ago, including implementing wider testing and stronger surveillance measures.

De le Vingne and others say Europe’s approach to combating the new coronavirus was initially too lax and severely lacking in epidemiological basics like contact tracing, an arduous process where health officials physically track down people who have come into contact with those infected to monitor how and where the virus is spreading.

During outbreaks of Ebola, including Congo’s most recent one, officials released daily figures for how many contacts were followed, even in remote villages paralyzed by armed attacks. After the new coronavirus emerged late last year, China dispatched a team of about 9,000 health workers to chase thousands of potential contacts in Wuhan every day.

But in Italy, officials in some cases have left it up to ill patients to inform their potential contacts that they had tested positive and resorted to mere daily phone calls to check in on them. Spain and Britain have both declined to say how many health workers were working on contact tracing or how many contacts were identified at any stage in the outbreak.

“We are really good at contact tracing in the U.K., but the problem is we didn’t do enough of it,” said Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious diseases physician at the University of Exeter in southwestern England.

As cases began picking up speed in the U.K. in early March, Pankhania and others desperately pleaded for call centers to be transformed into contact tracing hubs. That never happened, in what Pankhania calls “a lost opportunity.”

Pankhania added that while Britain has significant expertise in treating critical care patients with respiratory problems, like severe pneumonia, there are simply too few hospital beds to cope with the exponential surge of patients during a pandemic.

“We are already running at full capacity, and then on top of that we have the arrival of the coronavirus at a time when we’re fully stressed and there isn’t any give in the system,” he said, noting years of reductions in bed capacity within Britain’s National Health Service.

Elsewhere, the fact that health care workers and hospital systems have little experience with rationing care because European hospitals are generally so well resourced is now proving problematic. “Part of the issue is that Italian doctors are getting very distressed to make decisions about which patients can get the ICU bed because normally they can just push them through,” said Robert Dingwall, of Nottingham Trent University, who has studied health systems across Europe. “Not having the triage experience to do that in a pandemic situation is very overwhelming.”

In a departure from their normal role as donors who fund outbreak responses in poorer countries, countries including Italy, France and Spain are all now on the receiving end of emergency aid. But Dr. Chiara Lepora, who heads Doctors Without Borders' efforts in the hot spot of Lodi in northern Italy, said the pandemic had revealed some critical problems in developed countries.

“Outbreaks cannot be fought in hospitals,” she said. “Hospitals can only deal with the consequences.” Doctors in Bergamo, the epicenter of Italy's outbreak, described the new coronavirus as “the Ebola of the rich” in an article in the journal NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery, warning that health systems in the West are at risk of being as overrun by COVID-19 as West African hospitals were in the devastating 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak.

“Western health systems have been built around the concept of patient-centered care, but an epidemic requires a change of perspective toward community-centered care,” they wrote. That model of community care is more typically seen in countries in Africa or parts of Asia, where hospitals are reserved for only the very sickest patients and far more patients are isolated or treated in stripped-down facilities — similar to the field hospitals now being hastily constructed across Europe.

Even Europe's typically strong networks of family physicians are insufficient to treat the deluge of patients that might be more easily addressed by armies of health workers — people with far less training than doctors but who focus on epidemic control measures. Developing countries are more likely to have such workforces, since they are more accustomed to massive health interventions like vaccination campaigns.

Some outbreak experts said European countries badly miscalculated their ability to stop the new coronavirus. “But I think the fact that this is a new disease and the speed at which it moved surprised everyone,” said Dr. Stacey Mearns of the International Rescue Committee.

Mearns said the current scenes of desperation across Europe — doctors and nurses begging for protective gear, temporary morgues in ice rinks to house the dead — were unimaginable just weeks ago. In Spain, 14% of its coronavirus cases are infected medical workers, straining resources at a critical time.

“We saw hospitals and communities get overwhelmed like this during Ebola in West Africa,” she said. “To see it in resource-wealthy nations is very striking.”

The Associated Press receives support for health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.