Cav's Place

Romania has by far the highest COVID-19 death rate per million in Europe and the third highest in the world. The health system has been overwhelmed for quite some time, hospitals running out of space to even keep patients on chairs or stretchers, any intensive care bed that can be made available filling immediately, the number of patients in intensive care increasing along with the capacity, reaching 1750 today, and some patients starting to be sent to Hungary, who offered assistance. As of yesterday, all counties have an infection rate exceeding three per 1000 people over the past 14 days, Bucharest and Ilfov being far at the top, currently with 16.27 and 16.83, respectively, and Bucharest obviously having by far the highest number of cases.
So, after the national records that were set this Tuesday, 16743 confirmed cases and 442 deaths, Thursday the National Institute of Public Health proposed to quarantine Bucharest and Ilfov. It’s something which should have been done weeks ago, to give time for any other measures to have any positive effects, but I guess it’d have been a case of better late than never… If it would have at least been late instead of never, that is, since the next day the National Committee for Emergency Situations rejected the proposal, so for the moment we’re left with the 8 PM curfew for those who’re not vaccinated, and even that seems quite theoretical to me, since I’m yet to see anyone checking and I’ve been wandering around a fair bit after that hour. However, what will be proposed instead is to make the green certificate required in order to enter pretty much anything except stores selling food and pharmacies, which puts all the pressure on private entities to check, hardly even guaranteeing that a passed check means much of anything, and won’t keep people, regardless of their status, from wandering around and gathering. It will, however, allow for everyone to be tracked at a level unseen before, and that’s the frightening aspect.
I’m just now seeing another set of proposals, which include limiting indoor events and requiring the green certificate to access those that will still be permitted, limiting the number of participants and requiring distancing for outdoor events, and pausing the school year for two weeks, after which school will resume on-line where there are more than six cases per 1000 people, though preschool and primary school will continue in physical format regardless of the number of cases, and so will schools from places where over 70% of those over 16 are vaccinated. So still not much, and adding even more tracking, but at least adding some more limitations to gatherings and at least a partial return to the original decision of “only” increasing the infection level from which school moves on-line from three to six for this school year, a decision which was quickly changed to completely eliminate any such general threshold and only move the classes where there were confirmed cases on-line. But, either way, these proposals come from USR, so they don’t have much of a chance of being approved, considering the current political situation.
So we can only expect things to keep getting worse, until this wave will exhaust itself by infecting and killing pretty much everyone it can, the health system collapsing completely long before that moment. The WHO is apparently assigning a team to study the situation and try to understand how did it come to this in a country with unrestricted access to vaccines but, for a brief overview: The politicians, whichever side they’re on, don’t care, being too focused on their own battles for power; the medical personnel is utterly crushed and breaking down, those who actually care working themselves to death, perhaps even literally, until they can do no more; and the general population is as divided and distrustful as ever and possibly even more apathetic, with the majority unwilling or actually unable to care or think, not to mention do, and many in fact functionally, scientifically and politically illiterate.