In general, the Balkan countries won this battle with COVID-19, and certain forecasts show that the epidemic wave should end by the end of May or the beginning of June, said in an interview with the Anatolia Agency (AA) prof. Dr. Dragan Danilovski, epidemiologist and head of the Institute of Epidemiology and Biostatistics with Medical Informatics at the Medical Faculty, at the University “Ss. Cyril and Methodius” Skopje.
Prof. Dr. Daniloski explains that the most relevant indicator of the dynamics of the pandemic is not the number of infected, but the number of deaths, because the number of infected depends on the number of people tested.
In his opinion, one of the reasons for the low mortality rate caused by COVID-19 in the countries in the region may be the fact that all Balkan countries until thirty years ago had a socialist social order, with centralized health systems, in which vaccinations against many infectious diseases were mandatory. At the same time, he added that the rich Western European countries and the United States had relatively liberal health systems, and in most cases vaccinations were not mandatory.
He added that a possible reason was the fact that the prescribed restrictive measures were technically easier to implement and control in small countries, such as the Balkans, than in countries with large populations.
