Europe thinks it is past the peak of the first wave of the coronavirus

LONDON — All across Europe, the numbers are coming down.In Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Britain, public health officials — their faces often drained by exhaustion — are now expressing cautious optimism that the first wave of Europe’s devastating pandemic is ending.From Ireland to Greece, officials are seeing hopeful signs that coronavirus infections are peaking and have begun to plateau or recede, pointing to intensive care beds that are slowly opening up and a daily reduction in the number of new hospitalizations.In Paris, Milan and Madrid, hospitals and staff that were stressed to their limits just a few weeks ago, as thousands of coughing, fevered, breathless patients surged through their doors, are now reporting empty beds in their ICUs. There are ventilators to go around.The Severo Ochoa Hospital in Madrid made international news with images last month of sick patients sleeping on the floor, waiting to be seen by a doctor. Members of the European Union and Britain account for almost two-thirds of the 150,000 deaths recorded worldwide.But infectious disease experts say Europe’s effort to slow the pandemic — instituting quarantines across the continent more widespread and draconian than those seen during the plague in the Middle Ages — has worked.Just a month ago, the world was stunned to see photographs of Italian military trucks lining up outside the public hospital in the pretty town of Bergamo, ready to haul bodies to crematoriums.In an Italian city, obituaries fill the newspaper, but survivors mourn aloneAnd yet, even in the worst hit regions of northern Italy, where the virus first exploded in February in the little villages of Lombardy — where panicked doctors on shaky videos later expressed fears they would soon have to decide who lived and who died — even there, the numbers of new infections are falling.“The peak has already arrived, and we are recovering,” said Pier Luigi Lopalco, an epidemiologist at the University of Pisa, who advises Italy’s Puglia region on its response.