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March 2020. From a story in the international news, COVID-19 stepped onto Bulgarian soil. The government was faced with an operational headquarters headed by General Ventsislav Mutafchiiski. And the infectious disease specialist, Assoc. Prof. Atanas Mangarov, faced the headquarters and the general.
“We face trying times.” Human lives will be lost, “Gen. Mutafchiiski said.
“It is not a particularly dangerous infection. Not everyone who gets sick will die,” Associate Professor Mangarov said.
When the first infected were found and measures were tightened, Associate Professor Mangarov criticized all the decisions of the headquarters:
“The mandatory wearing of masks must be introduced, the absolutely mandatory wearing of masks,” Gen demanded at the time. Mutafchiiski.
“It’s a mask, not a gas mask. It’s like putting a grill on the window and thinking that flies and mosquitoes won’t get inside,” said Adjunct Professor Mangarov.
To defuse tensions, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov gathered critics at the headquarters of the Medical Council. This advice he had for two weeks, in which Adjunct Professor Mangarov managed to enrage him as well:
“We can shut down the country, shut everything down, and yet the epidemic will continue. It will stop when at least 70% of the population has COVID-19, “he said at the time.
MANGAROV VS PREMIERE
“It means saying: these will die, these will live. Say how many will die and indicate with their title, with their name. Then it will make sense to say: I am a teacher, 5,000 people will die, let’s see who they are, let’s push them forward and they will die,” said Prime Minister Borissov .
“I don’t want people to die,” Mangarov said.
We talked for an hour or so, and in the 40th minute before they brought the coffee, he said to me: Look what, Mangarov, if I were a woman, I would let you go, ”said the associate professor.
MANGAROV VS MANGAROV
Thus, after contradictions between Adjunct Professor Mangarov and staff, between Adjunct Professor Mangarov and the Prime Minister, the development of the epidemic led to contradictions between Adjunct Professor Mangarov and himself.
When he declared that mass tests were redundant in October, social media reminded him that in early March he himself had insisted on mass screening of the population with rapid tests:
“These tests should be used on a very broad scale. Because without them we are deprived of a very important diagnostic tool.
In October, however, Mangarov said the massive tests were a completely useless waste of money.
The associate professor also changed his position on the test of contacts with an infected person, when he himself was in the study of a television presenter, who later tested positive.
“The sensible thing to do is to test all the contact people who are there,” said the associate professor in March.
“They will test me if I have symptoms or if someone orders me to do the test. But if not, I will continue living as usual,” he said in October.
The associate professor’s forecasts also contradicted cases of the statistics.
“This disease must be treated by the youngest and healthiest public. These are the children, their mothers, their fathers, who are going to get sick, who knows what will not happen to them,” he said in April.
In August, however, a 19-year-old high school graduate from Veliko Tarnovo died of COVID-19 without a concomitant illness.
In early summer, when headquarters predicted that after the decline in the number of infected people a new wave would arrive in the fall, Associate Prof. Mangarov announced the end of the crisis:
“It just came to our attention then. What do we expect to happen in September? For new people to come and infect us. Where will they come from?
“In no way do I expect a second and third wave, in the way they have been described, that there will be an apocalypse,” he said in June.
At the same time, however, in October, the number of new cases in our country increased dramatically to more than 1,500 people per day.
“I will allow myself to say the name of this associate professor, this is Atanas Mangarov. It is in his conscience that a large part of society is confused,” said BMA President Dr. Ivan Madjarov.
For his positions during the pandemic, associate professor Antanas Mangarov was criticized by representatives of the National Operational Headquarters. The Bulgarian Medical Union condemned the “display of mixed signals” and downplayed the severity of the COVID epidemic, and Facebook removed its post on the effect of wearing masks as fake news.
Associate Professor Mangarov himself was filmed traveling on public transport without a mask, despite the ban and days after being in contact with a confirmed COVID-19 infected.
