At a conference in Sarajevo, the Center for Security Studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) presented the results of research on how BiH responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of a project funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.
The researcher of the Center for Security Studies, Sabahudin Harcevic, says that the data on the total number of recorded deaths as a result of COVID-19 (until mid-February, when they finished the research) shows that BiH is the fourth country in the world.
”That worried us, but it also best describes the way BiH responded to the pandemic,” noted Harcevic.
According to him, most of the problems are due to the inadequate health system and the lack of medical staff, which was determined during the research.
”But certainly the uncoordinated approach to adopting measures at the state level led to the fact that citizens were confused and that various conspiracy theories and groups were created on social networks, which ultimately led to citizens’ mistrust of the authorities,” he emphasized.
They intend to refer the research to the relevant institutions, and it also contains certain recommendations.
The research is part of the project called ‘Enabling just change in international health care governance – the COVID-19 pandemic and lessons learned from the Western Balkans’, which is being carried out in six countries of the Western Balkans. Harcevicsays that, as participants in the project, they intended to contribute to society and point out system errors.
As stated in the research, COVID-19 is a respiratory infection of the respiratory tract caused by SARS-CoV-2 (a virus that by its characteristics belongs to the coronavirus) and first appeared at the end of December 2019 in Wuhan, in the Chinese province of Hubei. In January 2020, it developed into an epidemic in China and spread worldwide.
The first case of COVID-19 in BiH was recorded on March 5th, 2020, and by February 15th of this year, 401,499 cases of COVID-19 were recorded, of which 16,265 were fatal. In the same period, around 678 million cases of COVID-19 were confirmed worldwide, of which around 6.7 million people died.
E.Dz.
