Over 9,000 people in the country died due to COVID-19 complications during the pandemic between 2020 and 2023. The largest percentage of patients died in state clinics in the country. It is unclear how many of these patients died due to an inability to fight the virus, but how many lost their lives due to inadequate care, lack of protocols and untimely action by medical staff before it was too late to save a person’s life? This COVID-19 crisis should make us think about where the weaknesses of our system are, and so far no one has learned anything from it and is not taking measures.
In Macedonia, the state COVID-19 centers were run according to some not strictly defined and arbitrary criteria of individuals and there was no unified COVID protocol for all levels of health care, neither for family doctors, nor for secondary or tertiary healthcare. This raises the question of whether exactly these criteria were the reason for the high death rate of our citizens during the pandemic.
