Last update and review: May 7, 2020.
Belarus is one of the most interesting experiments on COVID-19 epidemiology. Belarus is an authoritarian regime that can be described as a combination of outdated Soviet nostalgia with some common sense and a lot of sovereignty. Indeed, most of Europe is run by a wast network of sabotage, known to the public as “Soros”, “Bill Gates”, the “International Monetary Fund”, the “European Commission”, and the like. In Belarus, it is the country’s authoritarian and slightly eccentric leader Mr. Lukashenko (also spelled “Lukashenka”) who makes most of the important decisions. In a way, Belarus has the highest degree of sovereignty in Europe.
Belarus president Lukashenko decided to fight COVID-19 without lockdowns and a house arrest imposed on the population. “Distancing” that on the Orwellian New Speak is called “social distancing”, as well as other preventive measures, have been minimal in Belarus.
Belarus tests for SARS-CoV-2 a lot and reports a lot of new cases. As of the beginning of May 2020, the new cases, calculated as “new cases” divided by “all active cases”, increase at a high rate of above 7% a day.
In comparison to many other countries, the rate of increase of new cases of COVID-19 in Belarus does not look that bad. Notably, if we compare Belarus to the UK where the population has been in lockdown for many weeks, we can see that the difference is not impressive. In the UK, new COVID-19 cases increase by 4% a day.
Belarus would also seem to do well in terms of COVID-19 mortality with 0.65% as of April 29, 2020. But we probably should not trust Belarus data on mortality that much. The official documents on the site of the Belarus Ministry of Health repeat the WHO disinformation: “there is no treatment for COVID-19”.
For comparison, you can find the COVID-19 mortality rates in different countries in Europe in the table below. France reports a horrible mortality rate of 18.88% which is 33 times higher than the COVID-19 mortality rate in Iceland.
Thus, with Belarus, with have an experiment on how COVID-19 spreads if the prevention measures are minimal. How will the curve with new COVID-19 cases look for Belarus? Is it peaking during the first days of May 2020? Give your prediction in the comments to this post.
Not sure I want to predict, but the media silence about Belarus is highly deafening!
Well, there is no really need to have silence about the situation in Belarus. The propaganda machine unloads a constant flow of disinformation about everything and the public keeps consuming it.
As of June 6, 2020, a month after this article was published, we can see that the curve of new cases in Belarus did reach a plateau. There were never any peak in daily new cases in Belarus. The situation is similar in Sweden, Singapore, Ukraine, the UK, Iran and many other countries. Lockdowns didn’t have considerable impact. A number of other factors did.