LITOMĚŘICE, Czech Republic – A blinking blue light in the bedroom windows has become a feature of the nights. This is Litoměřice, a city in the north of the Czech Republic. The light comes from another ambulance going up the access road that leads from the dark and deserted city to a hilltop hospital. On board, there is likely to be another COVID-19 patient. This is the country with the highest COVID mortality rate on Earth and is experiencing another outbreak of infections.
Kateřina Steinbachová, a doctor, lives next to Litoměřice hospital in a medical residence. A year ago, this hospital was selected to be one of the special units of COVID for the northern part of the country.
Ironically, ambulance traffic is the only sign of life during these desperate pandemic nights.
“My parents told me that the world outside looks like the nights of the communist dictatorship,” says the 31-year-old doctor.
In the communist era, businesses closed earlier, there were no neon signs flashing at night and people preferred to be alone at home rather than wandering around. Boredom, anxiety and the feeling of abandonment suffocated the cities of that time. Last year, the series of restrictions, bans, curfews and blockades brought back these sad memories for many Czechs.
“Many of my older patients have fallen into depression, saying that the surroundings now remind them of the ‘communist normalization’ times. They feel swallowed by the gray ”, says psychotherapist Tomáš Rektor.
He is referring to the 1970s after the so-called Prague Spring, when Soviet tanks sent from Moscow brutally crushed the Czechoslovak rebellion against the communist regime. The bloodshed has put the communist hard line back in charge. Subsequently, they ruled the country with a mixture of bureaucratic exaggeration and violent repression.
In addition to the similarity in the appearance of things, it is the communist social legacy that has gained great prominence today. The mentality of many Czechs was formed during the dictatorship, which ended in 1989 after 42 years, when the current generation of Czechs over 50 was at the height of their lives. This has contributed significantly to the current health crisis, analysts say.
The COVID-related mortality rate in the Czech Republic per 100,000 remains the highest in the European Union, as is the daily number of people infected. Dozens of hospitals are on the verge of collapse, many of them unable to receive seriously ill patients due to a lack of ICU beds and medical personnel.
Dozens of hospitals in the Czech Republic have declared a “mass casualty event”, which means that ICU beds may not be available to patients who need them. The situation was so critical that the Czech government asked Germany, Switzerland and Poland to receive dozens of patients to help these crowded hospitals.
The current crisis here is particularly mind-boggling because the Czech Republic successfully crushed the virus during the first wave in spring 2020. The Czechs watched in horror as Italy, their favorite vacation destination, was devastated by the coronavirus. While hundreds of Italians died every day, in the Czech Republic the number of daily deaths in the first three months of the pandemic never exceeded 10. There were even days when no one died.
The COVID-19 pandemic served as a major test for this young democracy and many believe that after the initial triumph against the virus, the Czechs failed in a big way. There is still a feeling that people expect the government to solve their problems, rather than taking personal responsibility.
“Since the fall of communism, we have yet to learn how to live in freedom. We do not develop a sense of self-responsibility. We prefer to delegate to someone else. In this case, for the 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 the end of the totalitarian regime.
In times of crisis such as the COVID pandemic, this attitude of going unnoticed is unlikely to be useful if the government is incompetent. And the Czech government, under the leadership of the current and controversial Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš, has a long history of failed decisions and flawed strategies for dealing with the COVID threat.
Babiš, a former member of the Communist Secret Service police, acknowledged some mistakes made in a recent speech. Specifically, he said it was a bad decision to allow companies to reopen for the Christmas season and that relaxing masks in the summer was wrong. He also admitted that his government underestimated the British variant of the virus.
The local hospital in Litoměřicre is receiving these missteps and errors. It has overflowed with COVID patients who have been infected with the dangerous British mutation.
“My colleagues at the COVID units are exhausted. They have been in it for a year and, in recent months, they have had to face war situations ”, says Dr. Steinbachová.
Many hospitals have so few employees that they continue to ask for volunteer workers with little or no experience. Some even employ soldiers and firefighters. In addition to these extreme circumstances, many doctors and nurses have been infected and, according to government data, are among the professionals hardest hit in terms of COVID contagion.
And it is far from over. At the end of February this year, Prime Minister Babiš said that the month of March would be hell. Statistics proved that he was right. The hospitalization rate, the number of people seriously ill and currently infected are at record levels. And this 10.7 million country is fast approaching 27,000 COVID-19-related deaths. Overall, 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 that the Czech population is being forced into a period of self-examination, as the response to the required pandemic offers echoes of its autocratic past.
The democracies developed at the beginning of the pandemic failed to contain the spread of the virus because its people were not used to hearing what to do and many were defying restrictions, disseáček said. Autocratic regimes were more successful in enforcing the rules, but took advantage of the situation to pursue dissidents.
“The Czech Republic lies somewhere between these two systems,” he notes, saying that, on the one hand, many are deeply suspicious of the way in which Babiš’s government deals with the pandemic, while, on the other hand, there are still large bands of population that require more intervention.
Žáček fears that people are forgetting what they have learned since the end of the Cold War.
“I am concerned that, in the post-COVID era, a good number of Czechs want the government to continue helping them,” said Žáček, “and the country will return to socialism.”