Looking at the bottom line in terms of deaths, Czechia did very well in the first wave relative to most Western countries (see below for comparison with UK). It sounds like Jan can take a decent amount of credit for this. Thanks Jan! Also Petr Ludwig (mentioned in the next post of this sequence).
However, things look to have gone badly wrong in subsequent waves, to the point where now Czechia has one of the highest death tolls per capita in the world (9th, vs 34th for the UK [sort by Deaths/1M pop; Czechia is on 3694 and UK on 2414 as of writing]). What happened?
I had little influence over the 1st wave, credit goes elsewhere.
What happened in subsequent waves is complicated. One sentence version is Czechia changed minister of health 4 times, only some of them were reasonably oriented, and how much they were interested in external advice differed a lot in time.
[Can a mod help with embedding the chart in the parent comment? I couldn’t get it to work. Maybe something to do with being in explorer mode? It’s at this link:
Looking at the bottom line in terms of deaths, Czechia did very well in the first wave relative to most Western countries (see below for comparison with UK). It sounds like Jan can take a decent amount of credit for this. Thanks Jan! Also Petr Ludwig (mentioned in the next post of this sequence).
However, things look to have gone badly wrong in subsequent waves, to the point where now Czechia has one of the highest death tolls per capita in the world (9th, vs 34th for the UK [sort by Deaths/1M pop; Czechia is on 3694 and UK on 2414 as of writing]). What happened?
I had little influence over the 1st wave, credit goes elsewhere.
What happened in subsequent waves is complicated. One sentence version is Czechia changed minister of health 4 times, only some of them were reasonably oriented, and how much they were interested in external advice differed a lot in time.
Note that the “death tolls per capita in the world” stats are misleading, due to differences in reporting. Czechia had average or even slightly lower than average mortality compared to “Eastern Europe” reference class, but much better reporting. For more reliable data, see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02796-3/fulltext
[Can a mod help with embedding the chart in the parent comment? I couldn’t get it to work. Maybe something to do with being in explorer mode? It’s at this link:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&uniformYAxis=0&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=total_cases&hideControls=true&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=CZE~GBR
]