Morgues fill up in Romania and Bulgaria amid low Covid vaccine uptake

Romania and Bulgaria are recording the EU’s highest daily death rates from Covid-19, after superstition, misinformation and entrenched mistrust in governments and institutions combined to leave them the least vaccinated countries in the bloc.

“A village is vanishing every day in Romania,” Catalin Cirstoiu, the head of the Bucharest university emergency hospital, where the morgue is filled to overflowing with coronavirus victims, lamented this week. “What about in a week or a month? A larger village? Or a city? Where do we stop?”

Cristiou told Associated Press the system was near breaking point, “all caused by one thing: the population’s inability to comprehend they need to get vaccinated”.

While new infections have recently started to edge down, Bulgaria this week reported its highest ever total of daily fatalities. Its seven-day rolling average of deaths per million inhabitants reached 22.8, compared with an EU average of 3.1.

In Romania the average daily death rate hit 23.7 per million last week and has since dipped to 21, according to figures from OurWorldInData – still more than 30 times higher than in Portugal, France or Spain.

Despite ample vaccine supplies, the two countries have fully vaccinated the lowest proportion of their populations in the EU: 34.3% of Romania’s inhabitants have received two jabs, and 22.8% of Bulgaria’s. That compares with an average of 65.2% across the EU, with countries such as France, Finland, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Spain all nearing or exceeding 70% and Malta and Portugal surpassing 80%.

Low vaccine take-up has exposed a deep east-west faultline defined by poverty, underdevelopment and low levels of health education – and compounded, in many ex-communist eastern EU states, by very low confidence in government.

Surveys have consistently shown that populations in central and eastern Europe, much of which emerged from communist rule barely 30 years ago, place significantly less trust in national governments and institutions than in the west.

That has led to official campaigns promoting vaccination being widely disregarded, while efforts to deploy alternative, more trusted messengers such as family doctors or even priests have so far failed to substantially increase uptake.

In some cases, church leaders and politicians have even fuelled the suspicion caused by popular mistrust of government and online misinformation. A bishop in the Romanian Orthodox church is under criminal investigation for spreading Covid disinformation, while Diana Șoșoacă, a member of the country’s upper house, has repeatedly called the pandemic “the lie of the century”.

Political uncertainty has made matters worse. Romania’s government collapsed last month, and in Bulgaria the prospect of parliamentary and presidential elections on 14 November has left politicians reluctant to alienate voters by imposing stricter measures.

In both countries, the overwhelming majority of deaths are among unvaccinated people. In Bulgaria, Ivan Poromanski, the head of Pirogov hospital in Sofia, told local television that nine out of 10 patients in its intensive care unit died, and the number of deaths among the vaccinated was “minuscule”.

Romanian authorities introduced tighter preventive measures a fortnight ago, including a 10pm curfew and making vaccination certificates obligatory for activities such as going to the gym, the cinema or a shopping centre.

More than 90% of fatalities are unvaccinated, according to the health ministry, and roughly 85% are over the age of 60, with mistrust, misinformation and isolation keeping elderly people, in particular, away from vaccines.

However, Maria Sajin, the head of a university hospital morgue, said some of the dead were as young as 20 or 25. “They don’t understand they need to vaccinate, that there’s no medicine,” she said. “Nobody understands that vaccines save lives.”

Valeriu Gheorghita, Romania’s vaccination campaign coordinator, told Reuters there was “a mentality of ‘at my age I will live as long as I am meant to’. It’s very difficult to convince people to get vaccinated – it’s a matter of how they perceive life and risk of disease.”

Gheorghita said that unlike in other EU countries where many elderly people were in retirement institutions, in Romania they were more likely to be at home, alone and harder to reach. “And there is the issue of trust – they are just extremely hesitant.”