LITOMĚŘICE, Czech Republic: A blue light flickering through the bedroom windows has become a feature of the nights. This is Litoměřice, a town in the north of the Czech Republic. The light comes from one more ambulance going up the access road leading from the dark and deserted city to a hospital on the hill. There is likely to be another COVID-19 patient on board. This is the country with the highest COVID mortality rate on Earth and is experiencing another wave of infections.
Kateřina Steinbachová, a doctor, lives next to the Litoměřice Hospital in a medical residence. A year ago, this hospital was selected to be one of the special COVID units in the northern part of the country.
Ironically, ambulance traffic is the only sign of life during these desperate nights of the pandemic.
“My parents told me that the outside world looks like evenings during the communist dictatorship,” says the 31-year-old doctor.
In the communist era, business would close early, there were no neon signs flashing at night and people would rather stay at home than walk around. Boredom, anxiety, and feelings of abandonment suffocated the cities of that time. Last year, a series of restrictions, bans, curfews and closures has brought these unhappy memories to many Czechs.
“Many of my elderly patients have fallen into depression, saying that the environment now reminds them of the times of ‘communist normalization’. They feel swallowed by the grayness,” says psychotherapist Tomáš Rektor.
It refers to the 1970s after the so-called Prague Spring, when Soviet tanks sent from Moscow brutally crushed the Czechoslovak rebellion against communist rule. The bloodshed once again put the hard communist leaders at the helm. Subsequently, they ruled the country with a mixture of bureaucratic scope and violent repression.
Aside from the resemblance in the way things look, it is the communist social legacy that has become a great relief these days. The mentality of many Czechs was formed during the dictatorship, which ended in 1989 after 42 years, when the current generation of Czech people over the age of 50 were alive. Analysts say this has contributed significantly to the current health crisis.
The COVID-related mortality rate in the Czech Republic per 100,000 remains the highest in the European Union, as does the daily number of infected people. Dozens of hospitals are on the verge of collapse, many unable to receive seriously ill patients due to lack of ICU beds and medical staff.
Dozens of hospitals in the Czech Republic have declared a “mass casualty event,” meaning the ICU beds may not be available to patients who need them. It has become so critical that the Czech government has asked Germany, Switzerland and Poland to take in dozens of patients to help these overwhelmed hospitals.
The current crisis here is particularly mind-boggling because the Czech Republic successfully destroyed the virus during the first wave of spring 2020. The Czechs were horrified to see how Italy, their favorite holiday destination, was devastated by the coronavirus. While hundreds of Italians died every day, in the Czech Republic the daily death toll during the first three months of the pandemic never exceeded 10. There were even days when no one died.
The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a great test for this young democracy and many believe that after the initial triumph against the virus, the Czechs largely failed. There is still the feeling that people expect the government to solve their problems rather than take on personal responsibilities.
“Since the fall of communism, we still have to learn to live in freedom. We have not developed a sense of self-responsibility. We prefer to delegate it to someone else. In this case in government, “said sociologist Jiřina Šiklová, who was a close ally of the late President Václav Havel. She came from the same dissident circle as Havel and was a good friend of the first freely elected head of state after she finished. the totalitarian regime.
In times of crisis like the COVID pandemic, this transient attitude is unlikely to serve you well if the government is incompetent. And the Czech government, under the leadership of current and controversial Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, has a long history of failed decisions and wrong strategies to deal with the COVID threat.
Babiš, a former member of the communist secret service police, acknowledged some mistakes in a recent speech. Specifically, he said it was a bad decision to allow companies to reopen for the Christmas season and that the summer relaxation of the masks wearing the term was wrong. He also admitted that his government underestimated the British variant of the virus.
The local hospital in Litoměřicre is getting these wrong steps and mistakes. It has overflowed from COVID patients who have become infected with the dangerous British mutation.
“My colleagues in the COVID units are exhausted. They have been there for a year and, in recent months, they have had to endure war situations, ”says Dr. Steinbachová.
Many hospitals have so few staff that they continue to desperately demand volunteer workers with little or no experience. Some even employ soldiers and firefighters. In addition to these extreme circumstances, many doctors and nurses have become infected and, according to government data, are among the professionals most affected in terms of COVID infection.
And it’s far from over. In late February this year, Prime Minister Babiš said March would be hellish. The statistics proved him right. The hospitalization rate, the number of seriously ill and those currently infected are at record levels. And this 10.7 million country is fast approaching the 27,000 deaths related to COVID-19. Globally, the Czech Republic ranks first when it comes to deaths per 100,000.
Pavel Žáček, former director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, said the Czech population was being forced to do a period of self-examination, as the required pandemic response offered echoes of its autocratic past.
Žáček, the democracies developed at the beginning of the pandemic could not explode the spread of the virus because its people were not used to telling him what to do and many defied restrictions. Autocratic regimes were more successful in enforcing the rules, but they took advantage of the situation to go find dissidents.
“The Czech Republic is somewhere between these two systems,” he notes, saying that on the one hand, many deeply distrust the way the Babiš government handles the pandemic, while on the other there are still large population bands that call for more intervention.
Žáček fears that people will forget what they have learned since the end of the Cold War.
“I am concerned that in the post-COVID era, a sufficient number of Czechs want the government to continue to help them,” Žáček said, “and the country will return to socialism.”