The number of officially registered COVID-19 cases in Belarus passed 20,000 on May 7. Local hospitals are filled with patients, while independent media and unofficial Telegram messenger channels report on new outbreaks of the novel coronavirus all over the country.
Yet one man doesn’t believe that there is an ongoing pandemic. His name is Alexander Lukashenko, and he is the president of Belarus.
He’s also planning to host a military parade to prove his point.
Lukashenko believes that the pandemic is a “global psychosis.” He jokes that steam in the sauna and a shot of vodka are the best way to keep people safe from infection.
In Belarus, restaurants are open, schools welcome students and the country’s soccer championship is the last ongoing sporting competition in Europe.
Furthermore, the country’s dictator is forcing people outside, holding a nationwide street cleaning event called a subotnik in late April and greenlighting the so-called Victory Parade — dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s capitulation in World War II — for May 9.
Meanwhile, Cherykaw, a rural town in eastern Belarus, became the country’s most recent COVID-19 hotspot. In early May, the local council unofficially closed all schools to stop the spread of the deadly virus.
Days earlier, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that an increasing number of people were dying in the rural town of Stowbtsy, near Minsk.
Belarusian journalist Olga Tsvetkova says that many believe the state is hiding the real number of deaths from COVID-19 in the country.
“(In Stowbtsy) within one week, there were lots of new cases of death, lots of new tombstones at the cemetery, yet there wasn’t a single (official) death (from COVID-19),” she says.
“But all of those people were buried in closed coffins, with very few people around, which tells us that something was hidden,” she adds.
Concealed information
According to official statistics provided by the country’s health ministry, there are 21,101 people who have tested positive for COVID-19 in Belarus as of May 8. One hundred and twenty one people have died from the disease.
Home to nearly 9.5 million people, Belarus has the highest number of registered cases per 1 million people in the eastern European region, over six times more than in neighboring Ukraine. But the number of deaths is surprisingly low.
Independent journalists inside the country say that the official statistic is forged.
“It’s the inability to receive adequate information that raises concern,” Belarusian journalist Kanstantsin Lashkevich told the Kyiv Post.
Getting accurate information in Belarus isn’t an easy task. The health ministry publishes a short summary that only includes the number of cases and the number of deaths from COVID-19, without any further information.
There were days when no official information was provided at all.
“Our journalists have tens of unanswered requests (for information),” Lashkevich adds.
Parallel reality
Furthermore, the information provided by the state doesn’t align with what is happening on the ground.
Radio Liberty and Tut.by are the two largest independent online media platforms following the COVID-19 pandemic inside the country. Their reporting provides a striking contrast to that of the official media.
“If we were to paint two paintings, one based on the information provided by government news outlets and the other based on information provided by independent media, we would get completely different pictures,” says Lashkevich.
On April 23, Radio Liberty published an investigative piece from Stowbtsy, home to 15,000 people, where the local cemetery was packed with newly dug graves. The city’s death rate nearly doubled and the official cause of death was said to be pneumonia, which is among the most common complications of the coronavirus.
“In the country, no one has died from coronavirus,” Lukashenko said on April 13 when Belarus had 29 official deaths from COVID-19.
According to Lashkevich, such statements provoked the media and local governments to not mention coronavirus as an official cause of death.
Belarus’ Radio Liberty branch regularly publishes anonymous letters written by local doctors, patients or relatives of the deceased. The letters regularly contain information that most deaths believed to be caused by coronavirus are written off as the result of pneumonia or other health complications.
Meanwhile, doctors are forced to make their own masks.
On April 27, Tut.by published an article from Vitebsk, a regional capital home to over 300,000 people, which became the epicenter of COVID-19 in Belarus in late March.
Journalists talked to local doctors, who said that the city was poorly prepared to handle the sudden rise in patients with pneumonia.
“Later, we had to use our maternity hospital for coronavirus. Now, out of 290 beds (equipped to treat coronavirus patients), around 270-280 are occupied,” Vladimir Martov, head of the anesthesiology department at the Vitebsk emergency hospital told Tut.by. “That’s a lot,” he added.
The hospital’s director, Sergey Lazar, was fired three days after the article was published.
A deadly event
In total, as of April 18, Belarus had only 37 hospitals that were tasked with treating COVID-19 patients. Ukraine, a country with 14,195 recorded COVID-19 cases as of May 8, had 452 such hospitals from the start, according to the health ministry’s website.
Batyr Berdyklychev, World Health Organization (WHO) representative to Belarus, told Tut.by on May 1 that the situation in the country is among the worst in Europe.
“The growth rate of new cases in Belarus is one of the highest in the WHO’s European Region,” he said.
“The outbreak in Belarus has entered the phase of local transmission among the population, which requires an immediate increase in necessary action such as physical distancing,” he added.
People walk past a monument to the founder of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin in Minsk on April 22, 2020. (AFP)
According to Tsvetkova, many residents are behaving in line with worldwide norms and are transferring their business online and limiting public contacts. She calls it a “people’s quarantine.”
Lashkevich says that, even if there is such a practice as “people’s quarantine,” it is largely limited to the younger generation, while older people, in general, believe the state media that the risk of coronavirus is being exaggerated.
However, both Tsvetkova and Lashkevich agree that local non-governmental organizations and ordinary people have stepped up, raising money for hospitals and supplying doctors with basic protective gear.
Meanwhile, the government is driving people outside and is preparing to hold a massive public event primarily for older people, the group most at risk of dying from COVID-19.
Since mid-April, the streets of Minsk have been packed with soldiers without protective gear rehearsing for the Victory Parade. Their rehearsals draw substantial crowds of onlookers.
A large crowd is expected to watch the event. It will include many war veterans, to whom the parade is dedicated
“It’s deeply symbolic,” Lukashenko said. “Those people (during World War II) were maybe dying from viruses as well, but they didn’t feel it.”
