raging – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

BERLIN – After a day of frantic rescue efforts and orders to evacuate cities that were quickly filling with water released from violent storms, German authorities said late Thursday that after confirming numerous deaths, they were unable, at least 1,300 people to explain.

That staggering number was announced after rapidly flowing water from swollen rivers poured through towns and villages in two western German states, where news outlets said more than 80 people had died and other fatalities were expected in the hardest-hit regions.

With communication severely hampered, the authorities hoped the missing people would be safe, if out of reach. But the storms and floods have already proven deadly.

At least 11 other people are believed to have died in Belgium, according to the authorities, who also ordered residents of downtown Liege to evacuate when the Meuse, which flows through the center, overflowed.

The storms and the resulting floods have also struck the neighboring countries of Switzerland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, as a slowly moving weather system threatened to bring even more rain to the flooded region overnight and until Friday.

The devastation caused by the storm came just days after the European Union announced an ambitious plan to move away from fossil fuels over the next nine years in order to make the 27-country bloc climate-neutral by 2050. Early on, politicians drew parallels between floods and the effects of climate change.

But the immediate focus on Thursday remained the rescue effort, with hundreds of firefighters, rescue workers and soldiers working to rescue people from the upper floors and roofs of their homes, filling sandbags to contain rising waters and looking for missing people.

One of the hardest hit regions was the German district of Ahrweiler, where flash floods flooded the village of Schuld, washed away six houses and left several more shortly before the collapse. At least 50 people died in the Ahrweiler district, the police said.

With so many missing, the district authority said late Thursday that the death toll is expected to rise. “In view of the complexity of the amount of damage, a final assessment of the situation is currently not possible,” it said in a press release.

“We do not have exact death numbers, but we can say that we have many people who fell victim to this flood,” said Armin Laschet, the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, one of the most severely affected federal states in Germany.

“Many people lost everything they owned after the mud flowed into their homes,” said Laschet, who will replace Angela Merkel as Chancellor in the federal elections on September 26th.

The floods in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate were among the worst in decades, after days of continuous rain sank more water than the soil and sewer system could absorb.

Police asked people to upload pictures of the floods to help them find it.

The police in North Rhine-Westphalia reported at least 30 deaths, with at least 15 people being known in the Euskirchen district south of Düsseldorf. Many others were still saved, although some villages remained inaccessible.

Ms. Merkel, who was visiting Washington on Thursday, expressed her condolences to the missing and thanked the thousands of helpers. She has promised the federal government to support the affected regions.

“Whatever is possible, we will do wherever we can,” she said, adding that Germany had received offers of help from its European partners.

Hundreds of firefighters worked all night to evacuate the stranded people. In Altena, North Rhine-Westphalia, two firefighters were killed while rescuing people, the police said.

“The water still flows knee-high through the streets, parked cars are thrown to the side, garbage and rubble pile up on the sides,” said Alexander Bange, the district spokesman for the Märkisches Land North Rhine-Westphalia news agency DPA

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“It’s really very depressing here,” he said.

Dozens of communities remained without electricity, while some villages were completely cut off, the police said. Telephone and cellular networks were also down, making it difficult for the authorities to track down the missing persons.

Belgium and the Netherlands also saw significant flooding when the weather system took hold in the region. According to the public broadcaster RTBF, at least two people were killed in the floods in the province of Liège in Belgium.

As the Meuse continued to reach dangerous proportions, the regional authorities asked the people of the city to evacuate and, if this was not possible, to take shelter on the upper floors of the buildings. All shops were closed and tourists were advised to leave.

The Belgian Defense Force said it was using helicopters and personnel to help with rescue and salvage work, while reports say the river is expected to rise several meters and endanger a dam.

In the Netherlands, according to the Dutch news agency NU.nl, soldiers were sent to the province of Limburg for evacuation, where at least one nursing home had to be evacuated.

Intense rain in Switzerland caused the country’s weather service to warn on Thursday that the floods would worsen in the coming days. On Lake Biel, Lake Thun and Lake Lucerne there is a high risk of flooding and the potential for landslides has been pointed out.

The chairman of Friends of the Earth Germany in North Rhine-Westphalia combined the severe flooding in the region with a failed policy of the state legislature. The effects of climate change are one of the issues that were hotly debated in Germany ahead of the September elections, in which the Greens are running for second place behind the conservative Christian Democrats led by Mr Laschet.

“The catastrophic consequences of the heavy rainfalls of the last few days are mostly homemade,” said Holger Sticht, who heads the regional chapter and made lawmakers and industry responsible for building in floodplains and forests. “We urgently need to change course.”

Megan Specia contributed to the coverage.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Wednesday that he believes there is enough Covid immunity protection throughout the U.S. population that even if the highly transmissible Delta variant is in circulation, the country is unlikely to experience anywhere near as dire like previous points of the pandemic.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a raging epidemic across the country like we saw last winter. I think there will be niches of spread and the overall prevalence will increase, “said the former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration said on” Squawk Box. ”

“But I think that in parts of the country where vaccination rates are high, and that certainly applies to the northeast, in my opinion we are largely protected – at least from the current variants that are in circulation,” added board member Gottlieb of Covid Vaccine manufacturer Pfizer.

On the other hand, Gottlieb said parts of the country are more prone to outbreaks with the Covid Delta variant. These are places where the number of people who have previously been infected or vaccinated is low. He highlighted the situation in Missouri, where health officials have raised concerns about spikes in cases and hospital admissions, particularly in areas with lagging vaccination rates.

“If you are someone who has even been vaccinated in these parts of the country and there is a heavy epidemic of this new variant of the Delta, you are also at risk because we know the vaccines are not 100% and we know it. ” In vulnerable populations – people with compromised immune systems, people who are much older – the vaccines may not work as well over time. “

First found in India, the Delta variant has been identified in more than 90 countries, including the United States, where its prevalence doubles roughly every two weeks. In some countries, such as Israel, concerns about the Delta variant have led governments to tighten public health restrictions.

The UK postponed the most recent phase of its economic reopening earlier this month, citing the pace of new Delta variant infections and an increase in hospital admissions. Most of the cases involved unvaccinated people.

Los Angeles County officials released guidelines for inner masks this week, including those for fully vaccinated individuals, amid concerns about the Delta variant. It comes roughly two weeks after the county joined the state of California to lift mask requirements for fully vaccinated individuals indoors in most environments.

The World Health Organization on Friday also urged fully vaccinated people to continue wearing face masks, and officials said it was necessary to “play it safe” as many parts of the world are still unvaccinated.

“The goal should be to try to reduce transmission as much as possible here in the United States. I think we shouldn’t be rash,” said Gottlieb, who headed the FDA in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019 . “But we will see that the overall impact of the virus will be greatly reduced because so many people have been vaccinated.”

In the United States, around 154.2 million people, or 46.4% of the population, are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 180 million people, or 54.2% of the country’s population, have received at least one dose.

According to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data, there are an average of around 12,400 new coronavirus cases per day in the United States, based on an average of seven days. That is 10% more than a week ago. The daily average of Covid deaths fell 7% to 278 per day over the same period.

Despite the increase in cases, Gottlieb said he believed US public health officials should be cautious about reintroducing pandemic restrictions right now. Daily new infections remain dramatically lower than their daily high in the US of 300,462 on Jan. 2, according to Johns Hopkins data.

“I think the right response is first and foremost to have more people vaccinated,” said Gottlieb. “We have just got to a point where our mitigation should be really reactive, not proactive,” he added. “We shouldn’t shut things up or put off mask requirements in anticipation of spread. I think we should do this when we see signs of spread, signs of outbreaks. “

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC employee and a member of the board of directors of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, health technology company Aetion Inc., and biotechnology company Illumina. He is also co-chair of the Healthy Sail Panel of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean.