When the coronavirus pandemic began in March and Ukraine closed down for quarantine, many were quick to praise the Ukrainian government for its foresight and willingness to take swift measures to protect public health.
Now, however, the government has made it clear that the country is staying open, in spite of a growing number of COVID-19 cases. It’s difficult to blame them. Ukrainians lack the savings required to spend months at home. And the lockdown proved lethal to small and medium-sized businesses, an important political constituency.
But the problem is not Ukraine’s decision to reopen. Rather, it is the government’s unwillingness to take steps necessary to allow the economy and society to function safely during the pandemic.
Mask-wearing and social distancing are growing haphazard. Disinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 abound. Local authorities chafe at the regulations of the central government, and coronavirus information is poorly communicated to the public.
Ukraine’s early lockdown prevented an uncontrollable explosion of COVID-19 in the country. But the Health Ministry expects it to get worse in flu season, which usually lasts from October to April. The number of new cases and hospitalizations has already surged after the country reopened businesses and domestic and international travel.
But Ukraine is not doomed to a new large-scale outbreak, provided the government acts fast. There are several steps it can take to protect the country without going into another lockdown or harming the economy.
Make mask truly mandatory
As journalists, we have witnessed new cases increase daily and the government gradually lose control of the coronavirus response. That has us worried.
Hailing from the United States and Kyrgyzstan, we have both seen how coronavirus can ravage countries big and small, rich and poor. In the U.S., a slow, incompetent response and deep politicization of the pandemic allowed COVID-19 to bring a country with top-notch healthcare to its knees. In Kyrgyzstan, a sudden spike in cases of COVID-19 and its complication, pneumonia, overwhelmed the healthcare system after the lockdown was lifted, leading to shortages of hospital beds and medical staff, a high death rate and heavy reliance on makeshift day hospitals and volunteers.
Ukraine has neither boundless wealth, nor world-class health care. But there is one simple strategy that can protect countless lives and the medical system from being overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases: masks.
Officially, Ukraine requires members of the public to wear masks in stores, business places and on public transportation.
In practice, fewer and fewer people are wearing them. Those who do often wear them wrong, with their noses exposed.
This must stop. The Ukrainian government should have the police enforce masking — not just having a mask, but wearing it right — on all public transportation. The same should go for places of business like supermarkets, shops and banks — any place where a person can drop in from the street.
In theory, fines for failing to mask already exist. But the current procedure is ineffective. While a police officer files a report to the court that someone has violated the quarantine rules, only a judge can issue a fine, making the process far too slow. Moreover, the fines are so large as to make them morally impossible to support. Hr 17,000 ($620) is twice the average salary in the country. We personally would feel uncomfortable issuing such fines for taking a mask off in a supermarket, and it appears many judges are hesitant, too.
Smaller fines issued by the police like speeding tickets would be more efficient. Of course, citizens should have the right to challenge them in court, but most probably wouldn’t.
Whie it’s important to punish people for defying basic rules, the main enforcers should be businesses. They should deny service to customers who come in maskless or take off their masks — something we are starting to see in Kyiv too often.
At the same time, Ukraine needs an aggressive campaign to educate the public on why masks work and how to wear them. There should be posters and television ads showing how to wear them the right way and why this is the simplest means of protecting oneself and others when we are no longer forced to stay home. Posters should also remind them that this is required by law.
Fight COVID-19 disinformation
Incorrect information about COVID-19 is a serious problem around the world. Sometimes, this is natural “misinformation” — the result of our limited knowledge about the novel coronavirus and members of the public struggling to understand complicated subjects like medicine and epidemiology.
But there is also disinformation, created to deceive and often hyper-politicized. It poses a particularly serious threat when it encourages citizens to violate state health regulations.
Today, provocative rhetoric about a “fake pandemic” is increasingly spreading on social media in Ukraine.
In the first week of August, two small protests — against mask-wearing and 5G’s alleged hazard to people’s health — took place in Kyiv. Both fundamentally denied that COVID-19 is real and opposed the government’s quarantine measures.
There is little messaging on the importance of staying alert, taking the virus seriously and following the quarantine rules on Ukrainian television.
According to Detector Media’s weekly television monitoring, Ukrainian TV news programs stopped “reminding their viewers about the importance of maintaining distance, wearing masks and washing hands.”
One popular TV channel told its viewers: “It’s time to understand that COVID-19 will stay with us for long, that’s it’s not worth postponing life. Stop waiting and asking when this will end, when borders will reopen or flights resume. Psychologists advise to stop waiting and just live.”
And government communications on the coronavirus situation don’t help.
The most recent communication failure emerged after the government introduced a new system of color-coded quarantine zones based upon the epidemiological situation in the area. In theory, these zones are supposed to help the authorities intensify quarantine measures in areas with worse local epidemics, while easing them in lower risk areas.
In practice, few understand how it works. The math behind the indicators that designate one place as a green (low-risk) zone or a red (high-risk) zone was unclear from the beginning.
This has caused confusion among citizens and local authorities, who are supposed to tighten or relax the restrictions.
It’s unsurprising that the cities of Lutsk and Ternopil, marked as red, refused to shut down businesses and public transport again. Kyiv, on the other hand, which has the second-highest number of active cases, has only just been moved to the yellow zone. The new restrictions this entails — masks in transport, only distanced, outdoor mass events and movie theaters and cultural venues operating at 50% capacity — are all things Kyiv should already have been doing.
We don’t doubt the expertise of Ukraine’s health authorities. But if we, as journalists who follow the pandemic closely, sometimes struggle to decipher their bureaucratic language and get answers to our questions, how can ordinary citizens fare any better?
In the five months we have listened to the Health Ministry’s daily briefings, they have grown extremely repetitive and uninformative. Every morning, Health Minister Maksym Stepanov lists the numbers of new cases, deaths, recoveries and tests. He also calls on citizens to follow the quarantine rules — a moment when he seems utterly powerless — and then often pivots to other, non-coronavirus issues. His answers to journalists’ questions are usually superficial and there is no opportunity to clarify his words or pressure him for a more complete answer.
There is almost no analysis of new knowledge about COVID-19 coming from Ukrainian public health professionals, as if scientists and infectious disease specialists have learned nothing about the new disease, its transmission and course and its treatment. Relaying new insights about the outbreak in Ukraine and the latest findings from other countries’ response and research could mitigate fake information.
Overall, however, the solution to Ukraine’s growing COVID-19 epidemic is clear — and the government must rapidly take action to implement it.
Ukraine needs to make its citizens wear masks (properly!) and educate the public about COVID-19 and the importance of masks and social distancing.
Even for a poor country like Ukraine, this costs little and will yield major benefits for public health. And failing to take action will ultimately cost the Ukrainian government more — many deaths and further economic losses from the pandemic and a possible second lockdown.
