The holiday season is upon us, and usually that means packed shopping malls and kisses beneath the mistletoe, long-distance travel and big family festivities — just about everything, in other words, that could make an already dire pandemic even worse. So officials in multiple European countries, caught between a yule log and a hard place, are imposing a new wave of strict coronavirus lockdowns.
Leaders in Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic have announced bans on large gatherings and the closure of nonessential businesses over the second half of December into January.
“We have no choice: The number of contacts between people must be reduced,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said in a televised address to the country Monday evening. “Everything must now be focused on that.”
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