Most Ukrainians distrust the official COVID-19 statistics updated daily in Ukraine and believe they do not show the real number of cases in the country, a recent survey suggests.
Only 18.6% of adult Ukrainians believe that official coronavirus updates are accurate, according to a polling published on July 16 by Ukrainian pollsters Active Group and Expert Club.
About 34.2% of Ukrainians think the number of cases is lower than reported by the Health Ministry of Ukraine, while 20.5% believe the opposite — that there are more cases than reported.
Public opinion was different in April. At that time, more Ukrainians thought the government lowered the real figures, Oleksandr Poznii, head of Active Group, told the Kyiv Post.
Then people got “tired of the quarantine” and now they think the government exaggerates the epidemiological situation in the country when reporting on the coronavirus cases, Poznii said.
Initially, Ukraine received praise from the World Health Organization for its early success in combating COVID-19. But the government’s further actions faced criticism from business owners and ordinary citizens. Andriy Yeremenko, founder of Active Group, told the Kyiv Post that this change of mood is a behavioral issue.
This is a common attitude among Ukrainians, who are used to thinking that lawmakers lie. The end result is that citizens don’t trust politicians even when they tell the truth, he said.
The pollsters think that many Ukrainians now believe that the government amends the COVID-19 data to respond to the current political and economic situation, justify its decisions regarding quarantine restrictions and avoid criticism, Oleksiy Fedinsky, head of the Expert Сlub pollster, told the Kyiv Post.
Other Ukrainians also believe officials use statistics to exert pressure on small and medium-sized enterprises. Polling suggests that the country’s lockdown — when small businesses like cafes and restaurants had to close up shop, but large enterprises could often continue working — made people think it was a deliberate move, Poznii said.
Although the Ukrainian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been inconsistent, health care experts believe it isn’t lying about the number of cases.
It’s just that the statistics themselves are messy and incomplete, according to Pavlo Kovtonyuk, the former deputy minister of health.
“It confuses people’s opinion, not clarifies it,” Kovtonyuk said.
Different oblasts measure the COVID-19 cases differently, send updates at a different time and in different forms — via computer or by phone. There are oblasts that do not conduct COVID-19 tests regularly, especially on weekends.
That is why the Ministry of Health usually reports a lower number of cases on Mondays — fewer tests are done during days off.
For example, on Monday, July 13, Ukraine reported 612 new infections after conducting 6,976 tests. On Thursday, July 16, however, the number of cases grew to 848 and 13,013 tests were done.
According to Kovtonyuk, Ukraine is conducting enough tests, but local labs cannot analyze all of them. As a result, thousands of patients’ samples pile up. A lab can store swab samples for a week or two and then analyze all of them at once — and some patients may die or infect others by then.
This is exactly what happened in Lviv, now the hotbed of the outbreak in Ukraine, when its case count jumped from a little over 2,500 as of May 12 to over 7,622 cases as of July 16. Today Lviv Oblast tests people for COVID-19 more than other regions — that is why the numbers keep rising, Kovtonyuk said.
However, about a month ago, one Lviv regional lab was the only lab that analyzed test samples. It could carry out nearly 400 tests per day, while nearly 3,000 test samples piled up and waited for a few weeks in June.
“Now it’s better, but we still lag behind the European average,” Kovtonyuk said. In Poland, for example, which identified the first COVID-19 case and imposed quarantine restrictions in March, around the same time as Ukraine, the number of cases did not spike as much as in Ukraine after the easing of the quarantine.
Poland has nearly the same population as Ukraine, but carries out almost 50,000 tests per 1 million members of the population, while Ukraine does 19,220, according to the Worldometer tracking site. On July 16, Poland identified 333 new COVID-19 cases compared to 848 in Ukraine.
Like many countries around the world — Germany, Singapore, and South Korea — Poland has adopted the most effective approach while waiting for a COVID-10 vaccine to be developed, which is to “test, trace and isolate,” Kovtonyuk said. Ukraine failed to do that, he added.
