{"id":30614,"date":"2022-01-13T12:33:26","date_gmt":"2022-01-13T10:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aej-bulgaria.org\/?p=30614"},"modified":"2022-01-13T12:33:50","modified_gmt":"2022-01-13T10:33:50","slug":"covid-19-ww2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aej-bulgaria.org\/en\/covid-19-ww2\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 has killed more Bulgarians than World War II. Why do so many people still fail to see the threat?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Ivan Radev<\/h3>\n

\"\u0418\u0432\u0430\u043dIvan Radev is a journalist with more than ten years of experience working for Bulgarian and foreign media. He has worked as a correspondent of Romanian news agency Agerpres. He is a board member of the Association of European Journalists in Bulgaria.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\nAccording to<\/span> official statistics<\/span><\/a>, the number of proven, registered fatal outcomes following a coronavirus infection now exceeds 18,000 cases in Bulgaria. The actual number of fatalities, without a doubt, is higher because many people have died without ever getting tested for the disease. A metric called \u201cexcess mortality” indicates that this is the case, and Bulgaria is one of the world\u2019s leaders when it comes to excess deaths per capita. Between April 2020 and April 2021, registered deaths were about<\/span> 30,000 more<\/span><\/a> than in the past few years.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is well known that numbers, no matter how high they are, do not have an emotional impact on us. We perceive them as just another statistic unless we can relate them to something we know. Unless we realise that what lies behind these high numbers are the lives of people we knew or who were close to us. Alternatively, we could put numbers into perspective: for one year and three months, the coronavirus has taken the lives of more Bulgarians than all of World War II.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, we by no means aim to diminish the tragedy of war. By this example, we seek to demonstrate that we probably fail to grasp the real human toll taken by the pandemic because it is invisible, unlike military battles and the bombs which left Sofia in ruins. The actual cost is that now each one of us knows someone who died of COVID-19<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what is the point of saying all of this now, when the number of new cases keeps going down, and it looks insignificant compared to previous months?<\/span> In the summer of 2021 life seemed almost back to normal, and people seemed to think about the pandemic less and less often, just like the beginning of last summer. After months full of anxiety and the threat of lockdowns, in summer 2020, the situation in Bulgaria was almost normal.<\/span> It looked like we had gotten away with it, and those who had warned about the dangers of an upcoming new wave in autumn were cast aside as fearmongers.<\/span><\/p>\n

The result was that while we could have used last summer to prepare, we did not. Hospitals failed to increase their capacity by adding new beds or creating contingency plans. Then autumn came, and we got to a situation where people were dying in ambulances or on the hospital stairs while waiting for admission. There were weeks in which fatal cases exceeded the numbers typical for the same period of the year by 3,000 excess deaths. Despite all that, none of the public figures who \u201cforecasted\u201d that the pandemic would be over by summer and claimed that no special measures were necessary owned up to their mistakes. On the contrary, many of them continued to stroll through TV studios and media outlets continued to extend invitations to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

As of July 2021 we were in an almost identical situation as we were last summer \u2013 the pandemic looked like a distant memory, present mainly in news stories from other countries. In similar conditions last June, we started the rubric \u201c<\/span>Chronicles of the Infodemic<\/span><\/a>\u201d. Its main goal was to counter the widespread disinformation that, sadly, had found its platform on social and traditional media as well as offline. Disinformation is one of the primary reasons Bulgaria is among the least vaccinated countries in the EU and, correspondingly<\/span>, why it is among the nations with the highest coronavirus mortality rates.<\/span><\/p>\n