While Tegnell’s laissez faire approach to the pandemic has come at a steep price in his own country, his reasoning held a kernel of truth. It turns out that managing a pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint, just as Sweden’s controversial state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell quipped last year. Slovaks enjoyed an extended reprieve from the virus during late spring and summer of 2020: eating out, taking holidays abroad, and eschewing most protective measures. immunologist Anthony Fauci, predicted last May that the country might avoid a second wave altogether.

Slovakia’s top epidemiologist, Vladimir Krcmery, an avuncular figure akin to U.S. It largely avoided the first wave of the pandemic with early and widespread masking, border closures, and a strict lockdown, seeing daily cases in the dozens even as the virus ravaged Western Europe. Ten months ago, Slovakia was a public health success story. Slovakian hospitals are overstretched, and local media report they are rationing ventilators to prioritize younger patients. That translates into more coronavirus-related deaths per capita than in any other country except the neighboring Czech Republic-more than four times as many as in the United States and more than seven times as many as in Germany. With a population of just 5.5 million people, the country now records more than 2,000 new cases and around 100 deaths every day. Recently, the Slovakian government has visibly struggled to bring the coronavirus under control. The decision, which came after weeks of gradually worsening case numbers, sidelined the European Union’s vaccine approval process and ignored the protests of two smaller parties, leaving Matovic’s government hanging by a thread. On March 1, Slovakian Prime Minister Igor Matovic went ahead with the purchase of 2 million doses of the Russian-made Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, following in the footsteps of nearby Hungary.

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