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This paper follows European countries as they struggled through the first wave of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. We analyze when countries were confronted with the virus, how long it took until the number of new infections peaked and at what level of infections that peak was achieved via social distancing and lockdown policies. Most European countries were able to successfully end the first wave of the pandemic – defined as a two-week incidence rate smaller than 10 cases per 100,000 people. We find that countries in which the virus made significant landfall later in time enjoyed a latecomer advantage that some of these countries squandered, however, by not responding quickly enough and that an early lockdown was more effective than a hard lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an original protest event analysis (PEA) dataset covering 30 European countries, this paper provides three sets of results. Despite its unlikeliness due to lockdowns and social distancing measures, protest during COVID-19 has hardly been put to a halt even if, as a result of the restrictions imposed by the lockdown measures on the opportunities of public collective actions, protest occurred at significantly lower levels compared to pre-COVID-19 times, in terms of number of events and, above all, in terms of the number of participants. Moreover, protest was refocused on COVID-19-related issues, in particular on protest against the restrictions imposed by the government lockdowns, while non-COVID-19 issues, in particular economic issues, were crowded out. In addition, protest during the COVID-19-crisis also responded to highly contingent national context conditions which varied between the different regions of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 outbreak in Europe has brought attention to EU health policy as a focal point for solidarity, particularly as it concerns access to medicines. Against the backdrop of policy proposals for EU joint procurement of medicines, this article expands our understanding of public opinion towards this particular aspect of European integration. Drawing on data from a conjoint experiment in five EU countries, the study investigates the extent to which citizens' preferences concerning alternative policy designs for EU joint procurement of medicines are either structured along a pro-EU versus anti-EU or ideological divide, or are crisis driven by the perceived COVID-19 threat. The analysis reveals that individual preferences over the design of EU risk pooling for medicines are most strongly explained by Euroscepticism, while egalitarian ideology plays only a modest role. How citizens' perceived threat of COVID-19 affects their preferences for this form of EU risk pooling is dependent on the national context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]