LITOMĚŘICE, Czech Republic – A blue light shining on the bedroom windows has become a feature of the nights. This is Litoměřice, a town 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 hospital perched on a hill. There is likely to be another patient with COVID-19 on board. This is the country with the highest COVID mortality rate on Earth and is facing another wave of infections.
Kateřina Steinbachová, a doctor, lives next to Litoměřice Hospital in a nursing home. A year ago, this hospital was selected to be one of the special COVID units in the northern part of the country.
Ironically, ambulance traffic is the only sign of life in these desperate nights of the pandemic.
“My parents told me that the outside world looks like the evening during the communist dictatorship,” says the 31-year-old doctor.
In the communist era, business closed early, there were no neon signs flashing in the night, and people would rather stay home than walk. Boredom, anxiety and feelings of abandonment have suffocated cities ever since. Last year, the series of restrictions, bans, extinguishments and blockades brought these unhappy memories for many Czechs.
“Many of my older patients have fallen into depression, saying that the surroundings now remind them of the times of ‘communist normalization.’ I feel swallowed by the gray, ”says psychotherapist Tomáš Rektor.
It refers to the 1970s after the so-called Prague Spring, when Soviet tanks sent from Moscow brutally crushed the Czechoslovak rebellion against communist rule. The bloodshed brought the hard-line communists back to power. Subsequently, they ruled the country with a mixture of bureaucratic exaggeration and violent repression.
Apart from the resemblance in the way things look, the communist social heritage has become a strong relief these days. 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 years old was alive. This has significantly contributed to the current health crisis, analysts say.
The COVID-related mortality rate of the Czech Republic per 100,000 remains the highest in the European Union, as does the daily number of infected people. Dozens of hospitals are on the verge of collapse, many being unable to receive seriously ill patients due to lack of ICU beds and medical staff.
Dozens of hospitals in the Czech Republic have declared it a “mass event”, meaning that intensive care beds may not be available to patients in need. It became so critical that the Czech government called on Germany, Switzerland and Poland to receive dozens of patients to help these overwhelmed hospitals.
The current crisis here is particularly astonishing, as the Czech Republic successfully shattered the virus during the first wave in the spring of 2020. The Czechs watched in horror as Italy, their favorite holiday destination, was devastated by the coronavirus. While hundreds of Italians died every day, the daily death toll in the first three months of the pandemic in the Czech Republic 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 over the virus, the Czechs have largely failed. There is another feeling that people expect the government to solve their problems, rather than take personal responsibility.
“Since the fall of communism, we have not yet learned how to live in freedom. I have not developed a sense of self-responsibility. We prefer to delegate it to someone else. In this case in the government “, said the sociologist Jiřina Šiklová, who was a relative of the late President Václav Havel. She came from the same dissident circle as Havel and was good friends with the first freely elected head of state after the end of the totalitarian regime.
In times of crisis, such as the COVID pandemic, this transient attitude is unlikely to work well for you if the government proves incompetent. And the Czech government, under the leadership of the current, controversial prime minister, Andrej Babiš, has a long record of failed decisions and wrong strategies in dealing with the COVID threat.
Babiš, a former member of the communist secret police, acknowledged some blunders in a recent speech. Specifically, he said it was a bad decision to allow companies to reopen for the Christmas season and that the summer relaxation of the masks carrying the mandate was wrong. He also acknowledged that his government had underestimated the British version of the virus.
The local hospital in Litoměřicre is at the end of these mistakes and errors. It overflowed with COVID patients who became infected with the dangerous British mutation.
“My colleagues from COVID units are exhausted. They have been in it for a year and, in the last months, they have had to endure war situations “, says Dr. Steinbachová.
Many hospitals are so understaffed that they continue to desperately demand volunteer workers with little or no experience. Some even hire soldiers and firefighters. In addition to these extreme circumstances, many doctors and nurses have been infected and, according to government figures, are among the most affected professionals in terms of COVID infection.
And it’s far from over. At the end of February this year, Prime Minister Babiš said that March would be infernal. The statistics proved him right. The hospitalization rate, the number of seriously ill and currently infected patients are at record levels. And this country of 10.7 million is fast approaching 27,000 deaths related to COVID-19. Globally, the Czech Republic ranks first in terms of deaths per 100,000.
Pavel Žáček, former director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, said the Czech population is forced into a period of self-examination because the necessary pandemic response echoes their autocratic past.
Democracies developed at the beginning of the pandemic could not spread the spread of the virus because their people were not used to being told what to do and many defied the restrictions, Žáček said. Autocratic regimes were more successful in enforcing the rules, but took advantage of the situation to go after dissidents.
“The Czech Republic falls somewhere between these two systems,” he notes, saying that on the one hand, many are deeply disbelieving in the way the Babiš government manages the pandemic, while on the other hand there are still large areas of population I ask for more intervention.
Žáček fears that people will forget what they have learned since the end of the Cold War.
“I am worried that in the post-COVID era, a good enough number of Czechs will want the government to continue to help them,” Žáček said, “and the country will move back to socialism.”