Covid-19: How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe?

Plagued by political turmoil over“Europe’s last dictatorship” and with a president in denial of covid-19, how has Belarus ended up with one of the lowest death rates on the continent? Kata Karáth reports Kata Karáth Belarus’s beleaguered government remains unfazed by covid-19.

President Aleksander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, has flatly denied the seriousness of the pandemic, refusing to impose a lockdown, close schools, or cancel mass events like the Belarusian football league or the Victory Day parade. Yet the country’s death rate is among the lowest in Europe—just over 700 in a population of 9.5 million with over 73 000 confirmed cases.

Pandemic mindset The relatively low death rate is thought to be thanks to Belarus’s large hospital capacity which allowed the country to isolate people early on, says Andrei Vitushka, a healthcare policy expert at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies in Vilnius, Lithuania. With 11 hospital beds per 1000 people, Belarus outnumbers nations like Germany (8) or the UK (2.5).1 “It’s usually a problem because it takes a lot of money to maintain them, but it turned into our advantage in this situation,” says Vitushka, who is also an intensive care physician in Belarus. “Belarus, like most of the post-Soviet states, has a focus on “sanitary epidemiological problems” meaning large scale health scares like a pandemic,” says Rasmus Nilsson, a teaching fellow at University College London’s school of Slavonic and east European studies. This may be one reason Belarus also outperformed most of Europe in terms of mass testing during the first four months of the pandemic. While many countries were reluctant to carry out extensive testing, according to the state owned news agency BelTA, testing in Belarus started as early as 23 January. Most kits were donated or purchased from China and Russia2 using government funds and donations from companies3 and ordinary citizens.4 The country stepped up testing in early April,5 developing its own rapid testing kits6 and switching to the use of domestically produced reagents for polymerase chain reaction testing in May.7According to government information, there are now 32 laboratories processing samples across the country and testing is widespread in hospitals as well as from GPs. By the end of June, Belarus had conducted around one million tests,8 covering more than 10% of its population.