Neurospine 2020;17(2):344-347. Neurospine https://doi.org/10.14245/ns.2040202.105 pISSN 2586-6583 eISSN 2586-6591 COVID-19 in Europe: Le roi est mort, Editorial vive le roi! There’s no doubt about it. We Europeans were astonished to see how such a small (120 nm) corona virus could spread so quickly around the world, has since brought the global economy to its knees and dominates all areas of life. When the first reports from distant Wuhan, China appeared on the evening news, many of us thought that the epidemic would likely remain local or at least regional, controlled by the Chinese government’s large-scale containment measures. Despite a long history of bacterial & viral pandemics in Europe Corresponding Author (e.g., Plague “Black Death” 1347–1351, influenza “Flu pandemic” 1889–1890 & “Spanish Martin N. Stienen Flu” 1918–1919, HIV/AIDS pandemic 1981–today),1-3 the impact of the viral epidemics in https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6417-1787 the last decades on us has been moderate - avian flu H5N1, swine flu H1N1, Ebola epidem- ic, to name but a few... In contrary, the “Coronavirus Disease 2019” (COVID-19) was in- Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital Zurich & Clinical Neuroscience creasingly diagnosed – at a staggering rate – in Europe, especially in Spain, Italy, Germany, Center, University of Zurich, United Kingdom, France among other countries. On 30 January 2020 the World Health Frauenklinikstrasse 10, 8091 Zurich, Organization declared the outbreak to be a public health emergency of international con- Switzerland cern, and recognized it as a pandemic on 11 March 2020.4,5 E-mail:
[email protected] In the past couple of weeks, the COVID-19 crisis with its near 2.5 million confirmed cas- es (170,000 casualties) has fundamentally impacted our practice as spine surgeons world- wide, as it has exerted a significant effect on us as human beings.