Economy 26 April 2021, 12:36am

Hungary’s road to infamous global top position in COVID-19 deaths

Portfolio

Now that we have established that Hungary’s official SARS-CoV-2 statistics are not a suitable basis to make accurate projections on the trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic (not to mention that the key variants here are people and biology which make the problem a far cry from creating models for machines), it was time to at least show Hungary’s road to becoming No.1 in the world in terms of the number of COVID-19 deaths per one million population.

Our source was once again Balázs Pártos, a ‘concerned citizen’ who ‘toys with numbers’ in his spare time, and keeps publishing eye-opening posts on his Facebook page about the true nature of the pandemic in Hungary.

He uses only official data by Hungary’s government portal koronavirus.gov.hu, worldometers, and ourworldindata.

So what you’re about to see is not a trick. There are no special filters, hidden formulas, nothing of the sort.

Just a few numbers, err, okay, a lot of numbers grouped in cells and columns, and charts drawn from these data.

All you find below can be done by the four basic mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. And you need hours of work, collecting and sorting the data. But that’s really it.

This time the spotlight is on how devastating the pandemic was in Hungary. The country’s dramatic mortality statistics were put side by side with the same figures of other countries that were also hit hard by SARS-CoV-2.

If we wanted to add politics to the mix, we could start bashing the cabinet for doing too little too late, for re-opening the economy prematurely, for not being able to wait a few more weeks to have a pint on a terrace of a restaurant or a bar.

But, we’re not going to do that. There’s no need.

These numbers tell this story loud and clear.

Let’s hope that next time we publish an article like this, we won’t see that yellow row anywhere near the top of the tables. Let’s hope that when gyms re-open once Hungary has four million people vaccinated against COVID-19, we’ll see the PM sweating with a kettle bell in his hand instead of a glass of beer. That’ll be the day.

Source: Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Facebook page

Oh, why the demagoguery, you might ask. Well, more than 26% of the adult population in Hungary is obese. Obesity is the fourth most effective killer (2017), right before alcoholism. In 2018, Hungary was the 8th most heavy-drinking nation in the world.