New York-based media company Vox named Slovenia among the overlooked success stories in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Together with four other countries, Iceland, Greece, Vietnam and Jordan.
Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana has 250 confirmed Coronavirus cases, that’s less than 1 case per thousand people. (photo: Miran Kambic, slovenia.info)
‘From Slovenia to Jordan to Iceland, governments took early action to impose lockdowns, test and trace thousands of people, isolate the sick, encourage social distancing and preventive measures like mask wearing, and communicate honestly with the public. Those interventions curbed the number of new confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths, allowing leaders to reopen schools and businesses and reintroduce a sense of normalcy into everyday life. Some are now reporting no new confirmed cases or deaths.’ Vox wrote in its report.
The achievements of these countries are even more impressive considering how different they are from one another. Greece has avoided the worst despite being a tourist country in the EU, which is a global hotspot. Vietnam borders on China and has limited financial resources, but also managed to avoid a major outbreak. Slovenia’s relatively small epidemic is particularly impressive given that Slovenia is a growing tourist destination bordering Italy, one of the European epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Slovenia isn’t just flattening the curve. It’s squashing it. (Source: National institute of Public Health Slovenia)
Vox summed up their decision with the following words: ‘Slovenia’s success mainly stems from an aggressive early lockdown, quarantines of sick people, and generous government spending. The country’s first case was confirmed on March 4, and it only took Slovenian officials about two weeks to close schools and businesses and freeze public transportation. The government also gave 3 billion euros — 6 percent of Slovenia’s GDP — to citizens and businesses to survive the shutdown.’
The article is available here!
Slovenia continues decrease in active coronavirus cases. (Source: COVID-19 sledilnik)
Known as the Pearl of the Adriatic Sea, the charming coastal town of Piran is undoubtedly one of the most popular vacation destinations in Slovenia. It has four confirmed Coronavirus cases. (photo: Drazen Stader, Produkcija Studio, slovenia.info)
Bled is one of the most popular tourist destination in Slovenia and the whole Municipality of Bled has only two confirmed Coronavirus cases. (photo: Jure Korber and Tjasa Borsnak)
Bohinj is part of the Triglav National Park, the only natural park in Slovenia and one of the oldest in Europe. It still doesn’t have a confirmed case of Coronavirus. (photo: Luka Esenko)
In case you feel the symptoms of possible COVID-19 infection (coughing, fever, shortness of breath), call 112 for further instructions.
Coronavirus call center with up-to-date information is available at the free of charge phone number: 080 1404, operating daily between 8:00 and 20:00. It’s accessible only if you are calling from one of the Slovenian phone networks.
Contact phone number by the National Institute of Public Health (NIPH): +386 31 646 617, operating daily between 9:00 and 17:00. It’s accessible from any phone network.
You can take a US state that has small populations and say they’ve done well, too.
Europe and the UK have 140,593 deaths.
US has 72,000 deaths.
Why are we comparing a continent with USA? Fact is USA has the (not per capita!) biggest death number, biggest infected number etc. among all other countries… It is understandable regarding how many people from China and other hot spots Travelled to USA amid the outbrake…
Not when you compare apples to apples. When you take a look at Western Europe, their numbers are significantly higher. Their total death toll is nearly DOUBLE that of the US. And their daily death rate is also nearly double.
Western Europe and the US have similar cultures and population numbers.
Europe (all of it) is just a hair bigger in size than the USA. Many US states are bigger than the average European country. Europe in general has a higher population density than the USA, but that’s mostly western Europe.
USA isn’t even in the top 10 deaths per million residents caused by SARS-CoV-2 OR confirmed infections per million residents. Most of those are European micro-counties which have a high population density to begin with, plus the more densely populated western European countries.
I’m not surprised. Melania has been social distancing for decades!
Melania snuck them the intelligence reports Trump ignored.
slovenia has it easier than americans due to density. Isn’t USA doing better than Italy given adjusted ratios?
Population density is not really a good way of looking at it, on a country level. Percentage of urban population is around 50%, which yes, it’s less than USA, but unlike USA, it has a decent public transportation system. Majority of the population lives in the capital, and of those that live in border villages, lots of them migrate daily for jobs in Italy, while another subset of population works in Italian factories and on Italian ships, and remains there for months. Factories are mostly placed in hardest hit Italian regions, and once those factories closed, lots of their workers returned home. Same goes for it’s border and workers in Austria.
Majority of the population lives in the capital,
Not even remotely true. Ljubljana has a population of about 275,000 out of just over 2 million Slovenes. So about 15% live in the capital and about 25% in anything that could be considered even somewhat urban.
Slovenia has a comparatively widely distributed population with many small towns and villages:
1 Ljubljana 272,220
2 Maribor 95,171
3 Celje 37,520
4 Kranj 36,874
5 Velenje 25,456
6 Koper 24,996
7 Novo Mesto 23,341
8 Ptuj 18,164
9 Trbovlje 15,163
My cousins live in Koper just across the border from Italy and from what they told me what saved Slovenia was closing the border to Italy very early and imposing strict social distancing rules.
PS: I think Slovenia also benefited from its two other major neighbours, Austria and Croatia, also taking a hard and effective position on CV.
They had a lot more time to prepare and wasted it. No tests and very delayed regulations. And on top of that a president that didn’t exactly promote responsible behavior.
I wanted to be back for Christmas.
Amazing ! Perfect reason to visit!
must be nice to have a country that has less than 15 people in it
Melania and family are scheduled to return home very soon. Next time there’s a rally!
Bet Melania wishes she’d stayed at home.
I wonder if it’s because China doesn’t know what Slovenia is?
Slovenia is by far the most impressive one. Landlocked in the middle of Europe, not in the corner of the world, like Australia/ NZ (which btw is the reason why kangaroos are also a thing )
Slovenia did a good job, but isn’t it easier to achieve this with their population density compared to other countries?
It is. Doesnt take awau from the fact they did good of course but yeah. They have a very low density.
All of eastern Europe has very low death rates – for example, Germany is held up as a huge success with 83 deaths per million, but Slovenia is 48. But even that 48 is high by Eastern European standards – Serbia, Croatia, Poland, Czechs are all low 20s, while Bulgaria is at 12, and Slovakia 5. Ditto the eastern Baltics: Latvia 9, Lithuania 18, Estonia 41.
Some of this you can explain by the usual well-covered reasons: lower population density, no mega cities, no real travel hubs, etc. But have to wonder if there’s something else being overlooked – the difference is just incredible compared to western Europe.
Quarter of Croatian population lives in just one city officially, and there are a whole lot of us living there unofficially. We lucked out because Corona started being the it thing after our winter tourism season was more or less closed, and before our summer season started.
Can’t speak for other Balkan countries, but I know how stuff turned out in Croatia.
1) We were testing for twenty days before we got our first positive case. After getting it, the firm the guy worked at got closed down for two days to get disinfected, and all the people he was in contact with got two week payed leave with stay at home orders. The procedure has been the same for every next positive case. Those under stay at home orders are monitored by calls, or random police drop ins. We had a lot of cases of those people coming into apothecaries, and in response, the state enabled workers there to see who was under COVID safety measures ordered to stay home, and was reporting those people. After that information was let into news, the number of idiots taking a stroll to the apothecary magically dropped down real low.
2) Access to nursing homes has been restricted for weeks before we even got our first cases (no visits), and nursing staff has been working two weeks long shifts, two weeks of rest, and then mandatory testing before going back to work, which has significantly lessened the spread of the virus into nursing facillities. Same thing has been done across the board in our health system.
3) Orders of PPe equipment jumped up before shit hit the fan, and as a result, while we did have a lack of it in some areas, it wasn’t as severe as in other countries.
4) We enforced social distancing before we hit one hundred cases.
There’s a shit ton of other stuff, but these are the main measures. Truthfully, Balkan countries saw situation in Italy, and none of them were arrogant enough to think that our health system would have any better luck in facing corona head on. So we locked down.
If you look at the stats, majority of Europe is handling this well. Belgium, Spain, Italy, UK, France and to a degree Netherlands & Sweden are the ones where the measures weren’t handled properly and some still don’t. If we include the bloom in Russia, that makes it 36 countries of Europe which handled it pretty well and 8 who did not.
The Czech Republic and Slovakia did very well too. They pushed masks and social distancing early on, while our American leaders were telling us NOT to wear masks.
There is just something culturally among the Slavic/ Warsaw Pact countries that takes preparedness seriously.
Poland too – that region is doing so well it almost seems too good to be true. There’s some speculation that the TB vaccine, which most Eastern Europeans have had, confers some protection.
I am trying to understand how they as a relatively poor country are doing well besides early border controls.
I’m worried about the Polish people once the restrictions are lifted.
There are the obvious reasons why they are doing so well – early border controls, relatively low density, strong social distancing, etc… but their numbers are so good relative to W Europe that I think there must be some other wild card, like the TB vaccine, at play.
One of the things to be learned from this pandemic is that a higher GDP doesn’t automatically make you better prepared for a crisis of this scale, and thinking it does is plain hubris.
Compared to countries like the US, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France or Sweden, a lot of Central and Eastern Europe took relatively stricter measures and had a much faster initial reaction overall with school closures, group gathering bans, mandatory mask usage and so on. Obviously, no one has won the entire war just yet, but it really should be no surprise the impact has often been so much smaller there so far.
Success breeds arrogance and complacency. Countries that have known hardships and had decent leadership knew that there are no guarantees in life. But bad leadership seems to count most, see Brazil.
Honestly, I think brasil is such a lost cause to this virus that strict measures would have no use. But you can compare that to India which put the entire country on lockdown and had the police beat people with clubs to get crowds inside. I think theyll end up with the same result anyways, but Bolsonaro’s response is crazy anyways
The Czech Republic and Slovakia did very well too. They pushed masks and social distancing early on, while our American leaders were telling us NOT to wear masks.
There is just something culturally among the Slavic/ Warsaw Pact countries that takes preparedness seriously.
Great job Slovenia! Successful at (1) Closing down their land border with several European countries including Italy (2) Population willing to self isolate, and quarantine means successful fight against Covid-19. This deserves more press as it shows what a government and citizens working together can accomplish.
I’m not surprised. Melania has been social distancing for decades!
They have also made a study testing ~1300 people for active infection and antibodies. The results are… quite surprising – apparently 40/42 people having antibodies didn’t have any symptoms at all.
They changed that today… 65% of those 40 had very mild symptoms, 35% were asymptomatic
Speaking of underreported countries the Baltics are doing well as well!
Im not disputing the fact that measures taken were successful, whatever they were… but with a population of 2M it doesn’t seem newsworthy
Consider that we neighbor Italy which was a coronavirus hotspot and we’ve had a dozen or more separate introductions of the virus to our country from people visiting and skiing in Italy at the start of our outbreak. A number of doctors in particular, several, came from a holiday in Italy infected and spread the virus locally. We have strong economic and migratory ties with our neighbors.It’s not like we had 1 introduction and that was blown up to over a thousand cases because of bad monitoring. We’ve had a flood of positive cases coming out of Italy all across the country simultaneously that we contained quite rapidly.
We might not have the highest population but if USA for example did as well as we did the outbreak would be contained at 16000 deaths. The current projections are it’s going to beat that by an order of magnitude and that might be conservative.
I’m sure we’ll also experience the 2nd wave, reemergence but it seems unlikely we’ll do so bad as larger advanced countries per capita and that’s with the handicap of sharing a porous shengen border with Italy that was the first western country to blow up.
Overall, an amazing job. Even more impressive when you think of how close Slovenia is to Italy.
From this Italian: congratulations guys, keep those numbers down! ❤️
Not just close, they even directly border!
I want to be in Slovenia.
It goes without saying, good work. What I’m curious about is what happens in the future w/r/t international travel, etc. with these countries that have little to no cases.
The world is going to be seriously strange for awhile when you have some countries with 0 cases for months, and other countries will have hundreds of thousands…
Good Job Slovenia! Keep it up!
This is one of the few countries I’m actively keeping up to date on as far as Covid-19 news, along with New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, Austria and Germany. It’s just nice to see what is happening in the countries that are “doing well”, gives the rest of us more hope.
We are also doing very well in Australia with many states reporting 0 new cases a day for some time now. Never been to Slovenia hope to see it one day 🙂🙂
The pandemic winner: Will It be Sweden or Slovenia?
Is this the pandemolympics?
That’s amazing! Well done Slovenia, we’re rooting for you 🙂
Slovenia is doing it right.
How do I apply for citizenship?
Respect to Slovenia. 👏🏼👏🏿👏🏾👏🏻
This seems good but I’m not sure of the death.
Deaths are inevitable when it comes to the disease.
All the Balkan countries seemed to have done very well in handling this, Greece included
I can’t speak for all Balkan countries, but my relatives from North Macedonia told me that there are strict protection measures. There are curfews in place for adults (7am-3pm), children (1pm-3pm), and the elderly (11am-3pm). If anyone breaks curfew they are fined. Also masks are mandatory for anyone who leaves the house during the hours that they are allowed to leave the house. There were also weekend quarantine: I only know of Easter weekend when people were not allowed to leave their homes from Friday until Tuesday of Easter weekend.
Depends on the country. Serbia went that far, and is I think the country with worst stats in the region at the moment. Bosnia also had a curfew, with mandatory mask wearing, and no going outside for those over 65 and under 18 years old.
Croatia does not have a mandatory mask wearing (only recommended) and never had curfews. We did have control over passing district lines after the earthquake happened in Zagreb, because a lot of people, some that were positive escaped and went for the coastal cities and islands. In practice, it hasn’t been followed strictly – for example my own district had one day border control, the next day it was removed, because we didn’t have access to some essentials stores and institutions. The same was a rule for a lot of smaller districts. Also, permissions to leave the district were handed for basically everything, as long as you weren’t a proven or suspected COVID case. A couple of weeks ago restrictions were removed, and hopefully, starting Monday, the regional restrictions are also gonna be removed.
You clearly have never heard of Balkan diaspora then. Hell, Slovenia literally borders Italy…
A more likely explanation would be, Balkan countries locked down harder than EU countries, and people respected the lockdown more.
Slovenia doesn’t really have a large diaspora. That said many (North) Italians come to Slovenia for cheap gas and to gamble, and Slovenes love to ski in Italy.
Slovenia doesnt have a big diaspora, but Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, etc have pretty huge diasporas. Granted, Serbia isnt doing very well but the rest arent doing bad at all.
That’s not really true. Think about West Virginia in the US that borders states that have large numbers of infected people. West Virginia is a “success” story simply because fewer people live there and fewer people want to go there. See Slovenia.
And people in WV barely wear masks.
I would argue that West Virginia and slovenia are quite different in terms of location and circumstance.
-population density of WV is 77, Slovenia’s is 267 (per square mile). This indicates that Slovenia is much more urbanized while the terrain is different as well. WV sees most of its population tightly clustered into five or six hot spots, Slovenia’s population is much more dispersed.
-Slovenia might not be the hottest tourist spot, aye, but it features plenty of medieval towns and architectural remnants of previous eras that render it similar to a discount Czech Republic de facto. However, it’s tourism industry brought in ‘just’ 2.75 billion euros last year, while WV brought in $4.75 billion dollars last year (0.93 euros = 1 dollar atm). Clearly, both places are visited quite often (if you could find WV’s 2019 number of overnight stays, I’d appreciate it; Slovenia reported 11.77 million foreign tourist stays in 2019).
I mean we do, all the first cases in Serbia, Croatia. Bulgaria are connected to Italy and furthermore a lot of people from the Balkans live and work in Germany ,Italy, France,(countries with a large number of infected) who returned home after the lockdowns started.
Because they don’t have that many people coming in from hot zone countries probably
Good job Slovenia! Love from your Italian neighbour! 👏🏼😊
You’ve been through hell noone deserves. But I hope Italy gets better and better, soon. I love your country and its people. 💛 -A Slovenian neighbour
Thank you so much for the kind words! I’m trying to stay hopeful for now, there’s no use in just seeing the dark part of it … I loved your country when I visited and I hope we’ll be able to travel again soon! ❤️