BELGRADE, Serbia — At the main hospital in Romania’s capital, the morgue ran out of space for the dead in recent days, and doctors in Bulgaria have suspended routine surgeries so they can tend to a surge in COVID-19 patients. In the Serbian capital, the graveyard now operates an extra day during the week in order to bury all the bodies arriving, AP reported.
For two months now, a stubborn wave of virus infections has ripped mercilessly through several countries in Central and Eastern Europe, where vaccination rates are much lower than elsewhere on the continent. While medical workers pleaded for tough restrictions or even lockdowns, leaders let the virus rage unimpeded for weeks.
“I don’t believe in measures. I don’t believe in the same measures that existed before the vaccines,” Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said last month as the Balkan nation sustained some of its worst daily death tolls of the pandemic. “Why do we have vaccines then?”
A World Health Organization official declared earlier this month that Europe is again at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. While several Western European countries are seeing spikes in infections, it is nations to the East that are driving fatalities. Romania, Bulgaria and the Balkan states recorded some of the highest per-capita death rates in the world in the first week of November, according to the WHO.
Experts say fumbled vaccination campaigns and underfunded and mismanaged health systems set the stage for the latest outbreaks, which gathered pace as leaders dithered. Some are acting now — but many doctors say it took too long and is still not enough.
Many governments in the region are facing elections soon, and that no doubt made them reluctant to force people to get vaccinated or impose unpopular lockdowns even in former Communist nations that once carried out mandatory inoculations without hesitation or where leaders were quick to introduce closures earlier in the pandemic.
Hospitals in Bulgaria, with its low vaccination rate, were forced to temporarily suspended all non-emergency surgeries so more doctors could treat the influx of COVID-19 patients.
“Politicians now think only about the elections, but there inevitably will be a lockdown, however in tragic circumstances,” Ivan Martinov, a leading cardiologist at Sofia’s main emergency hospital, told national radio. Parliamentary elections are being held Sunday.
Soaring infections appear to have been a wake-up call to some extent in Croatia, which saw unusually large lines of people waiting for vaccines in recent days.
Authorities said on Wednesday that more than 15,000 people received their first dose a day earlier — a significant jump after vaccinations all but halted in the Adriatic country of 4.2 million.
Croatia and neighboring Slovenia have also introduced COVID passes in recent weeks.
But medical organizations in Slovenia have warned that the Alpine country’s health system is still on the verge of collapse. They urgently appealed to people to do their best to avoid seeking urgent care in the coming months.
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