The management of the pandemic crisis during the fourth wave of COVID-19 – the Delta variant – can be generally described as satisfactory. The main criterion for such an estimation is the act that the population infection rate and the number of deaths from COVID -19 in the period corresponded to the European average, says the report “Efficiency of Management of COVID-19 Crisis in the Republic of Moldova, August-December 2021” that was produced by the Association for Participatory Democracy (ADEPT).
In a news conference at IPN, ADEPT executive director Igor Boțan said the satisfactory level of the measures taken to handle the pandemic is also due to the international support enjoyed by Moldova. This was equal to approximately one third of the Ministry of Health’s budget. The official data show that Moldova, since the start of the pandemic crisis, has benefitted from international support, protection equipment, devices and vaccine doses to the value of almost €45 million.
However, health authorities’ results in containing COVID-19 could have been more pronounced if they had managed to achieve an immunization rate of about 70% towards the end of 2021, as it was stipulated in the national immunization plan. Despite the broad campaign to promote the utility and necessity of vaccination for reducing cases of infection, primarily for alleviating the effect of infection with COVID-19, only about half of the target for attaining collective immunity could be immunized.
According to Igor Boțan, the restrictions imposed by the authorities to prevent the spread of the infection were another important factor in dealing with the pandemic crisis. During the fourth pandemic wave, the National Extraordinary Public Health Commission declared a state of public health emergency and announced the alert levels for delimiting the areas affected by the virus.
The comparison of the rigorousness indexes based on a number of restrictive parameters shows that the measures taken by the Moldovan authorities were moderate against the measurers taken at European level, but were appropriate for the pandemic situation in the country. From this viewpoint, as regards the observance of human rights, the authorities of the Republic of Moldova complied with the recommendations of the Venice Commission and other international institutions, adopting measures in favor of public health by limiting the right to free movement within the acceptable limits.
By the infection rate, Moldova is the last but one in the region. This means that the Moldovan authorities, using the available mechanisms, managed well the pandemic crisis. Moldova is somewhere in the middle of the rankings by the death rate.
Igor Boțan also said that the audit of the management of the pandemic crisis conducted by the Court of Auditors was opportune and very useful for emphasizing irregularities in the monitoring of the validity and administration of vaccines. Irregularities in statistics concerning the pandemic and its impact were reported also by the administration of the Ministry of Health. Therefore, the improvement of monitoring and the high-quality processing of statistical data are imperatives.
