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Why does Belgium have the highest mortality rate in the world?
The | Reading time: 4 minutes.
This department store can only open half in the Corona crisis
Different crown rules apply in each country. So also in Belgium and the Netherlands. This is a problem especially in the small town of Baarle. Because the border zigzags through the city and even through the shops. WELT reporter Christoph Wanner was there.
In no country in the world do as many people die from the consequences of the corona virus per capita as in Belgium. The reasons for this are also a warning to other countries, including Germany.
BThe spread of the coronavirus in Belgium has started in a similar way to other European countries. It was the ski season that caused the disease to spread massively from northern Italy to the country in early March, shortly after all of Belgium had a winter break.
Some 11.5 million people live in Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels, a seventh of the population of Germany. And yet, in the crown pandemic, Belgium reported 5,828 more than 1,000 more deaths than the Federal Republic. The critical points of Corona in the country are the regions of Antwerp (4904 cases), Liège (4888 cases) and East Flanders with the city of Ghent (4810). With 4109 cases, Brussels has been somewhat milder to date.
With 503 deaths per million inhabitants, Belgium is the sad leader in the number of deaths worldwide, ahead of Spain (446) and Italy (391). The death rate is also higher than elsewhere: Johns Hopkins University has 5,828 deaths (14.6 percent) among 39,983 confirmed infections. It is 10.4 percent in Spain and 13.3 percent in Italy.
How are high numbers produced in Belgium? Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès Sophie Wilmès says Belgium is working “as transparently as possible,” simply reporting more deaths, “including suspicious cases and not excluding patients suffering from other diseases.”
In fact, the high Belgian mortality rate is above all an expression of the country’s counting system. Belgium includes all crowned nursing home deaths in its official figures, unlike France or the United Kingdom, which is only just beginning to do so and has so far mainly counted positive deaths in hospitals. There are a large number of unreported cases with the already high number of victims. And Germany too, Belgian politicians say, has to catch up here. “Our goal is to be transparent to our people,” a government official told Politico.
Suspicious cases without proof are also counted
In Belgium, it is sufficient if a death in a nursing home is considered a suspicion of a crown, that is, he died with the corresponding symptoms, without having tested positive for Covid-19, because the test rate in homes is poor, such as this is the case in other European countries. It looks similar.
This shows a known problem: many of the international crown numbers can say more about the intensity of the tests and the accuracy of the diagnosis than the actual spread of the virus in individual countries. It was not for nothing that the United States and Britain had relatively few crown cases in March until the numbers gradually increased, as more evidence reduced the number of unreported cases.
But that does not change the fact that in Belgium it is mainly nursing homes where the virus spreads rapidly, increasing the number of deaths. More than 50 percent of crown deaths have occurred in nursing homes and nursing homes across the country. Every fifth virus screening test among older people in 85 households was positive.
Nurses transmit viruses without protection between residents.
As the daily newspaper “Le Soir” reports, nurses and employees worked in appropriate facilities for weeks without protective equipment, leading to a high number of infections among nurses, which in turn spread the virus among residents. To date, caregivers sometimes only receive protective masks if there has already been a confirmed crown case in the corresponding home. Because in Belgium, as in many places, there is a lack of protective equipment.
In 2019, six million FFP2 masks were destroyed in Belgium that the country had accumulated during the swine flu era: the expiration date had passed, a step that was understandable in itself. However, for cost reasons, they were not replaced by new masks, which at that time were still easily available on the world market.
After all, the size of the total population in Belgium has shrunk as a result of exit restrictions, and the number of cases is growing more slowly. The peak in the number of deaths was reached on April 10, on the 16 there was another small increase, now the rate is again at a constant level of around 300 deaths per day. 70 percent of these are now registered in nursing homes and nursing homes.
