LITOMĚŘICE, Czech Republic — A blue light flickering over the bedroom windows has become a feature of the nights. This is Litoměřice, a city in the north of the Czech Republic. The light comes from another ambulance climbing the access road leading from the dark, deserted city to a hospital on a hill. There will probably be another COVID-19 patient on board. It is the country with the highest COVID mortality rate on earth and is experiencing another increase in infections.
Kateřina Steinbachová, a doctor, lives next to Litoměřice Hospital in a medical residence. A year ago, this hospital was chosen to be one of the special COVID units for the northern part of the country.
Ironically, ambulance traffic is the only sign of life during these desperate nights of the pandemic.
“My parents told me that the outside world looks like it did at night during the communist dictatorship,” says the 31-year-old doctor.
Back in the communist era, businesses would close early, there were no neon signs clipping at night and people would have to stay home rather than wander around. Boredom, anxiety and feelings of abandonment suffocated villages at the time. Over the past year, the number of restrictions, bans, curfews and locks for many Czechs has brought back these unfortunate memories.
Many of my older patients have fallen into a depression and said that the environment now reminds them of the times of ‘Communist normalization’. They feel as if they are being swallowed by greyness, ”says the psychotherapist Tomáš Rector.
He refers to the so-called Prague Spring in the 1970s when the Soviet tanks sent from Moscow brutally crushed the Czechoslovak rebellion against the communist government. The bloodshed had the Communist hardliners at the helm again. Thereafter, they ruled the country with a mixture of bureaucratic overreaction and violent repression.
Apart from the similarity in how things look, it is the communist social legacy that is sharply illuminated these days. The thinking of many Czechs was shaped during the dictatorship, which ended after 42 years in 1989, when the current generation of Czech people over 50 was in the prime of their lives. This has significantly contributed to the current health crisis, analysts say.
The COVID-related death rate per 100,000 of the Czech Republic remains the highest in the European Union, as is the daily number of infected people. Dozens of hospitals are collapsing, and many are unable to receive seriously ill patients due to the lack of ICU beds and medical staff.
Dozens of hospitals in the Czech Republic have declared a “mass casualty event”, meaning ICU beds may not be available to patients who need them. It became so critical that the Czech government asked Germany, Switzerland and Poland to take in dozens of patients to help these overwhelming hospitals.
The current crisis here is particularly striking because the Czech Republic successfully crushed the virus during the first wave in the spring of 2020. Czechs watched in horror as Italy, their favorite holiday destination, was plagued by the coronavirus. While hundreds of Italians die every day, the daily death toll in the first three months of the pandemic in the Czech Republic was never more than 10. There were even days when no one was killed.
The COVID-19 pandemic served a major test for this young democracy, and many believe that the Czechs had great failure after the initial triumph against the virus. There is still a feeling that people expect the government to solve their problems rather than take personal responsibility.
“Since the fall of communism, we still have to learn how to live in freedom. We did not develop a sense of self-responsibility. We prefer to delegate it to someone else. In this case, the government, “said sociologist Jiřina Šiklová, a close ally of late President Václav Havel. She comes from the same dissident circle as Havel, and she was good friends with the first elected head of state after the end of totalitarian rule.
In times of crisis such as the COVID pandemic, it is unlikely that this surprising attitude will serve you well if the government proves incompetent. And the Czech government, led by the current, controversial Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, has a long track record of failed decisions and finalized strategies in dealing with the COVID threat.
Babiš, a former member of the police in the communist secret service, admitted some mistakes in a recent speech. He specifically said it was a bad decision to allow businesses to reopen for the Christmas season and that the summer relaxation of the masks with a mandate was wrong. He also acknowledged that his government had underestimated the British version of the virus.
The local hospital in Litoměřicre is on the receiving end of these errors and mistakes. It overflows from COVID patients who have become infected with the dangerous British mutation.
‘My colleagues at the COVID units are exhausted. They have been in it for a year and have had to endure warlike situations over the past few months, ‘says Dr. Steinbachova.
Many hospitals have so few staff that they desperately ask for volunteers with little or no experience. Some even employ soldiers and firefighters. In addition to these extreme conditions, many doctors and nurses are infected and are, according to government figures, one of the hardest hit professionals in terms of COVID infection.
And it’s far from over. At the end of February this year, Prime Minister Babiš said that the month of March would be hellish. The statistics proved him right. The hospitalization, the number of seriously ill and currently infected are at record levels. And this country of 10.7 million is fast approaching 27,000 COVID-19 deaths. Worldwide, the Czech Republic ranks first in terms of deaths per 100,000.
Pavel Žáček, a former director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, said the Czech population was being forced into a period of self-examination as the required pandemic response echoed their autocratic past.
Developed democracies at the beginning of the pandemic could not blunt the spread of the virus because their people were not used to saying what to do, and many defied the restrictions, Žáček said. The autocratic regimes were more successful in enforcing rules, but took advantage of the situation to apply to dissenters.
“The Czech Republic is falling somewhere between the two systems,” he said, noting that on the one hand many Babis’ government’s deal with the pandemic is very distrustful, while on the other hand large sections of the population still need more intervention.
Žáček fears that people will forget what they have learned since the end of the Cold War.
“I am concerned that a good number of Czechs in the post-COVID period want the government to continue to help them,” ZŽčček said, “and the country will move to socialism again.”