Coronavirus mortality: Hungary has become the seventh worst performing country in the world



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In terms of population, two dwarf states, Gibraltar and San Marino, have seen the highest number of deaths in the world so far, if these dwarf states are excluded from the statistics due to their distorting effect.

By the way, several countries in our region are on this list: the Czech Republic ranks first and Slovenia third.

Compared to the situation in mid-February, we were three countries higher on the list – we were only in 10th place at the time.

Since then, we have also left Bosnia, the United States and Portugal behind.

All this shows that Hungary, after the excellent performance observed in the first wave (suppressed epidemic, very low mortality), caught up with the worst performing countries in the world in the second wave. It shows the same performance in many countries where both the first and second waves have put pressure on health care systems.

However, care must be taken when comparing the number of deaths, as not all countries use the same methodology to calculate the number of deaths from coronavirus. However, most countries choose the method used by Hungary, according to which if a patient dies when the coronavirus test is positive, they are a victim of the epidemic.

However, the number of victims is the best indicator of the true size of the epidemic in a country, since the number of positive cases detected through testing depends largely on the amount of tests that a country performs. And there are huge differences in this, not just around the world, but even within Europe. There are places where individual social groups are regularly screened, mass testing is done, while elsewhere only symptomatic cases are screened. That is, comparing the number of positive cases does not help in the orientation, but the number of deaths from coronavirus shows much more than that.

It’s also worth noting that in many countries, the data is likely to be cosmetical, so governments will kill fewer coronavirus patients. This is more common in authoritarian countries in the East (but New York State also recently revealed), meaning that it could easily be that these countries are not reporting lower patient numbers and death rates because they would fight the virus much better.

Cover image: Getty Images



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