By Neil
Clark
By any objective
assessment, governments in the eastern half of Europe have dealt with the
Covid-19 outbreak better than many in the west. Yet, because of deep-seated
attitudes of superiority, few are giving credit where it’s due.
Europe is divided again,
but this time not by a wall.
Compare the Covid-19 deaths worldwide per one million
population, as of April 22, by country.
Top of the list is
Belgium with 525.12 deaths per million. Then comes Spain (445.49), Italy
(407.87), France (310.45), the UK (261.37), the Netherlands (227.26),
Switzerland (173.54), Sweden (173.33), and then Ireland (150.41). Spot
anything? They’re all western European countries.
You have to scroll down
quite a way before you get to countries in central or eastern Europe.
Romania has had 25.57
deaths per million. Hungary, 23.03; Czechia, 18.92; Serbia, 17.9;
Croatia, 11.74; Poland, 10.6; Bulgaria, 7.02; Belarus, 5.8; Latvia, 4.67;
Ukraine, 3.61; Russia, 3.16; Albania, 2.87; and Slovakia, 2.57 (amounting to
just 14 deaths).
Why is nobody discussing truly staggering differences in
death rates between Eastern and Western Europe? In the @FT graphs none of EE countries is even
included. The gap is just striking. (Worldometer, 22 April).
How can we explain this
new division of Europe? Well, it’s clear that geography has played its part.
The main vector for the spread of Covid-19 has been population movements and,
in particular, international air travel. More people visit western Europe than
the east. There’s more coming and going. Covid-19 can be seen accurately as a
virus of turbo-globalization, and western European countries are more
turbo-globalised than those to the east. They also tend to be more densely
populated, with some very large cities, which the virus likes, as it allows it
to spread quicker.
But while eastern Europe
has a number of ‘natural’ advantages, this doesn’t, I think, tell the whole
story. Governments in eastern Europe have generally shown more common sense
than most of their western counterparts. They quickly did the most obvious
thing that you need to do when a virus has got its walking boots and rucksack
on: they closed borders.
On March 12, Czechia
declared a state of emergency and barred travelers from 15 countries hit by the
novel coronavirus, including Iran, Italy, China and the UK. It then went into a
‘lockdown.’ On the same day Slovakia closed its borders to non-residents and
imposed a mandatory quarantine for anyone returning from abroad.
Poland closed its borders
on March 15 and Hungary followed suit one day later. Russia’s far east border
with China had already been closed since the end of January.
Compare the decisiveness
with which eastern European countries pulled up their drawbridges, with the
hesitation in the west. On March 12, French President Emmanuel Macron
declared “this virus has no passport”. As I wrote at the time,
liberal ideology and virtue signaling were being put before public
health.
The virus might not have
a passport, but the people carrying it in from China, and then from Italy, most
certainly did! It was only on March 17 that there were signs that western
European states were going to do what their eastern neighbors had already
done. “The less we travel, the more we contain the virus,” said
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. You don’t say!
At least western
continental Europe did take some action on borders, albeit a week or so too
late. Britain, by contrast, while imposing a 'lockdown' on domestic citizens,
has continued to allow into the country unchecked flights from all over the
world, including from New York, Iran and China.
It’s not just shutting
borders and imposing strict quarantine measures that eastern European countries
did right.
Generally, they’ve been
quicker to act than their western counterparts. The culture of government
undoubtedly plays a part.
I lived in Hungary for
several years in the 1990s and was impressed by what I call the ‘administrative
class.’ The people who work for the government, the civil servants, the old
communist ’bureaucracy’, if you like, were very competent. They got the job
done, with a minimum of fuss. In so many ways because of this efficient
administration and a very high level of general and technical education,
eastern European countries are actually better-run than many in the west,
particularly Britain, where incompetence seems to lead on to great rewards.
Countries where there was a 'five-year-plan' political culture not surprisingly
are better at planning than those where there wasn't. Or, as the old
saying has it, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Another legacy of the
much-maligned socialist era might also have played a big part in minimizing the
impact of Covid-19 in eastern Europe. As RT reported earlier in the month, ‘striking’
evidence has emerged showing that the BCG tuberculosis vaccine might be
protective against Covid-19.
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