At the main hospital in the Romanian capital, the morgue ran out of space for the dead a few days ago. Doctors in Bulgaria have suspended routine surgeries in order to treat the flood of COVID-19 patients.
In the Serbian capital, the cemetery now works one more day a week to be able to bury all the bodies that arrive.
Over the past two months, a persistent wave of infections has relentlessly hit many countries in Central and Eastern Europe, where the vaccination rate is much lower than in the rest of the continent.
Although medical workers have called for tough restrictions or even quarantines, governments have let the virus spread unhindered for weeks.
“I don’t believe in measurements. I don’t believe in the same measures that existed before vaccines, ”Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said last month when the Balkan country recorded one of its worst daily death toll from the virus in the pandemic. “What do we have vaccines for then?”
A World Health Organization official declared this month that Europe is once again at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. Although several Western European countries have seen their infections rise, it is the countries in the east that are driving the death toll. 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 failed vaccination campaigns and poorly managed and underfunded health systems paved the way for the latest outbreaks, which picked up speed as governments faltered. Some have taken action now, but many doctors say they are too late, and they are not enough.
Many governments in the region are facing elections soon, and there is no doubt that this made them reluctant to force people to get vaccinated or impose unpopular quarantines, even in former communist countries that in the past imposed mandatory vaccinations without hesitation or where leaders imposed rapid closures at the start of the pandemic.
However, by ignoring calls from the medical community for swift action, politicians have likely further undermined trust in institutions in countries where corruption is rampant. Vaccine misinformation has also found fertile ground given widespread mistrust of authorities.
That has made countries face the new outbreak with few defenses. Although vaccine resistance has been a problem in countries around the world, many in Central and Eastern Europe have especially low rates for places where supply is not a problem.
Bulgaria and Romania, both in the European Union, have between 23% and 35% of their population fully vaccinated, respectively. Bosnia and Herzegovina barely has 21% of people fully vaccinated.
The doctor and health statistician Octavian Jurma described the slow reaction in his country as a “textbook example” of “the tragic consequences produced by a political control of the response to the pandemic”.
The government finally introduced a curfew this month that requires people without a COVID pass – which certifies vaccination, recovery from the disease, or a negative test – to stay home between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. . Infections have dropped slightly since then, but hospitals are still overwhelmed.
At the main hospital in Bucharest, the bodies of those killed by COVID-19 were placed in a hallway in recent days because there was no room in the morgue. A plastic tarp was installed in a waiting room to convert part of the space into an emergency unit.
In Serbia, some hospitals are so overwhelmed that they only treat coronavirus patients, prompting some doctors to sue Brnabic, whose government faces elections in April.
“Since Brnabic said he did not believe in the measures, some 900 people have died,” Slavica Plavsic, a specialist in pulmonology, told N1 television on October 21.
The prime minister rejected those criticisms and on Thursday said she was proud of her government’s performance.
Meanwhile, authorities at the cemetery in Belgrade said they now had an average of 65 burials a day, when the normal before the pandemic was between 35 and 40. Now the undertakers work on Sunday, something they did not do before, to manage the workload.
Few measures against the virus have been introduced in neighboring Hungary. As in Serbia, the Hungarian government says it would rather rely on vaccines. With almost 60% of people fully vaccinated, the country is better positioned than most of its neighbors, but it still has a large part of the population unprotected.
The Hungarian government this month ordered the use of masks in public transport and allowed private employers to require their staff to be vaccinated.
But Gyula Kincses, president of the Hungarian Chamber of Doctors, said it was “too little, too late” and recommended that masks be made mandatory in all enclosed spaces.
In a recent interview, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose populist party faces elections next spring, said that imposing a mandatory vaccination “would go beyond the limits of what Hungarians would accept,” although he admitted that the new restrictions could only slow down, not stop, the spread of the virus.
Hospitals in Bulgaria, with their low vaccination rate, were forced to suspend all non-emergency operations in order to have more doctors treating COVID-19 patients.
“Now politicians only think about the elections, but they will inevitably quarantine, albeit in tragic circumstances,” Ivan Martinov, a leading cardiologist at Sofia’s main emergency hospital, told the national radio station. The elections were held on Sunday.
To some extent, the spike in infections appears to have been a wake-up call in Croatia, where vaccination centers have shown unusually long lines in recent days.
Authorities said Wednesday that more than 15,000 people had received their first dose the day before, a significant increase in vaccinations, which had virtually come to a standstill in the Adriatic country of 4.2 million people.
Croatia and neighboring Slovenia have also introduced COVID passes in recent weeks.
But medical organizations in Slovenia have warned that the Alpine country’s healthcare system remains on the brink of collapse. They have urged people to do whatever they can to avoid going to the ER in the coming months.
“There are traffic accidents, work accidents, other infections,” said Bojana Baovic, head of the Slovenian Chamber of Physicians. “This is an alarming situation with which we can deal with the utmost solidarity.”
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