ALMERE, Netherlands -- A helicopter rose into the sky Friday carrying a covid-19 patient from the Netherlands to a German intensive-care unit, the first such international airlift since the pandemic first threatened to swamp Dutch hospitals in the spring.
The coronavirus is again gripping Europe and straining health care systems that struggled for equipment and personnel during the pandemic's first wave.
Elsewhere on the continent, an absence of noise will underscore the virus's resurgence. More than two-thirds of the people living in France were to be subject to a nightly curfew starting at midnight Friday, hours after health authorities announced that the country had joined Spain in surpassing 1 million confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic.
"The epidemic is very strongly accelerating," French President Emmanuel Macron said after visiting a hospital near Paris.
France became the second country in western Europe and the seventh worldwide to reach that number of known infections after reporting 42,032 new daily cases. Of the 445,000 confirmed cases the World Health Organization had recorded in the past 24 hours, nearly half were in Europe, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead on covid-19, said.
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The head of the World Health Organization warned Friday that countries in the Northern Hemisphere were at a "critical juncture" as cases and deaths continue to rise.
"The next few months are going to be very tough and some countries are on a dangerous track," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a media briefing from Geneva.
Curfews to rein in nightlife and other opportunities for the virus to spread are some of the increasingly drastic measures European nations are enforcing to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The 9 p.m.-6 a.m. curfew taking effect for at least six weeks in 38 regions of France come on top of the government imposing the same restrictions in Paris and other French cities last week.
The extension means that 46 million of France's 67 million people will be under curfews that prohibit them from being out and about during those hours except for limited reasons, such as walking a dog, traveling to and from work and catching a train or flight.
italy curfew
In Italy, where the governors of the three regions that include Rome, Milan and Naples declared overnight curfews early in the week, the capital moved to make "nightlife" hours even shorter for young people who tend to hang out in trendy piazzas, carousing for hours without masks as they sip cocktails and knock back beers.
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Protesters in Naples, angry over the just-imposed 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. regional curfew and by the governor's vow to put the region under lockdown to try to tame surging infections, clashed with police on Friday night.
RAI state TV said merchants joined the protest, hours after Gov. Vincenzo De Luca told citizens in a televised speech that he was "moving toward closing everything down" except essential services. Demonstrators threw rocks and smoke bombs, and police officers responded with tear gas, Italian media reports said.
Rome's populist Five-Star Movement mayor, Virginia Raggi, signed an ordinance putting off-limits, until Nov. 13, several gathering spots highly popular for nighttime drinking starting at 9 p.m. The crackdown covers landmark nocturnal hangouts including Campo de' Fiori, a vast expanse in the heart of Rome that doubles as an open-air food market during the day, and Piazza Trilussa, a square near the Tiber River that is usually packed in the evening with rowdy drinkers.
A 4½-hour nightly curfew is to come into effect tonight in the Greek capital, Athens, and the country's second largest city of Thessaloniki, as well as several other areas deemed to have high infection rates.
In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez publicly appealed for the country to pull together to defeat the coronavirus.
"We have to step up the fight," he said in a televised address to the nation, which this week became the first European country to surpass 1 million officially recorded covid-19 cases. Sanchez admitted, though, that the true figure could be more than 3 million, because of gaps in testing and other reasons.
The much steeper figure is based on serology tests, which measure the antibody response, Sanchez said Friday in Madrid. At the same time, he indicated that curbs would not be tightened in a way that causes unnecessary damage to the economy.
"We have to put in place the measures needed with the least economic impact," Sanchez said. "We must at all cost avoid going back to home confinements as we did in spring," he added. "The next few weeks and months, now that we enter the winter, will be difficult, very difficult."
Restrictions on European daily life even extended to canceling the one-day fall session of the 31-seat parliament on the Arctic island of Greenland after a member of the assembly's financial committee was in contact with a person who had tested positive.
SLOWDOWN IN INDIA
As the United States and Europe grapple with fresh surges in coronavirus cases, the outbreak in India is slowing for the first time since the pandemic began.
Epidemiologists and doctors say the virus is in retreat -- at least for now -- in the country of more than 1.3 billion people.
After seven-straight months in which cases increased relentlessly, culminating in a devastating September surge, the number of new infections per day in India dropped sharply in October.
India is home to one of the largest outbreaks on the planet. Last month, the country hit a peak of nearly 100,000 cases in a single day, a record in the pandemic. Since then, however, daily cases have fallen by about half and deaths by about a third.
The downward trend in India's cases means it is no longer on track to overtake the United States as the country with the most coronavirus cases in the world. India has 7.7 million cases compared with 8.3 million in the United States. Each day this week, India has reported fewer new cases.
India is still adding more than 50,000 cases a day, an enormous challenge for its health care system, especially in rural areas. The country is preparing to celebrate its biggest holidays, normally a time when large crowds gather.
A fresh spike in infections after the festival season -- when colder weather also drives people indoors -- is a real possibility, experts say. The winter months bring severe air pollution across an area of northern India, which exacerbates respiratory illnesses.
Worldwide, the virus has infected more than 41 million people and killed more than 1.1 million, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University. The true numbers are far higher because of gaps in testing and reporting cases.
Information for this article was contributed by Peter Dejong and Mike Corder of The Associated Press; by Rodrigo Orihuela of Bloomberg News; and by Joanna Slater and Niha Masih of The Washington Post.
