Benchmarks sign ~ 10K excess Covid19 death in Hungary, the takeaway?
Introduction
Countries in Europe, though seemingly made the same anti pandemic measures showed varied performance. Hungary is remarkably sticking out with its death rate. Have a quick look at these differences in performance. Do we learn from all this?
Measures, health infrastructure and health state of population
The deaths due to Covid19 were affected by 3 main factors: measures to control the pandemic (the content of the measures, the timing, and the implementation), the health infrastructure, and the health state of the population.
The health infrastructure of the countries in Europe was typically very overloaded during peak periods. Though, governments generally affirmed that the health infrastructure was prepared professionally and most likely not have contributed to mortality at all or to a negligible extent versus the total cases. What about the other two factors?
Benchmarking helps in assessing performance
Benchmarking gives a hint to think further about the role of the other two factors in the case of Hungary. 6 peer groups were created out of the European countries. These are typically used for comparisons in business life (same size, geographical proximity or common historical and social characteristics etc.).
The principles of formation of the peer groups are same population size (8,69–10,7 million) plus Israel (9,1) which is culturally much closer than geographically; the Southern Western European countries (Hungary’s development level is closer to this group); neighbouring countries from the former Eastern Bloc plus former countries of former Yougoslavia; a broader CEE pool; ‘the narrow core’ of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with and without Czechia, and major countries of the Balkans.
The interesting thing is that it doesn’t matter which peer group we use to investigate, together with Czechia Hungary is sticking out strongly in terms of the death rate. We take the simple arithmetical mean of death rates of these peer groups and project it to Hungary’s population. The end result is that all out of the 6 peer groups show a uniformly significant excess (~ 6K- ~ 13K) Hungarian mortality compared to the ‘normalized’ resulting from the average death rate of the peers.
Let’s ‘drill down’ one level and include the health state of the population.
Life expectancy does not seem to explain
To simplify this, we have the life expectancy at birth and the healthy years of life expectancy statistics reflecting general health conditions of the population. First I checked this latter one, but I could not rely on those statistics. Those were generally contradictory to other statistics as well as to life experience. I found the previous more objectively measurable, thus, I used that.
Mapping death rates with the life expectancy of the male population we see at least two things. First, Western European countries and Slovenia all have significantly lower death rates than Hungary with much higher life expectancy, despite that the aged population is at the most risk of this pandemic. Secondly, in the case of former Eastern bloc countries similar or even lower life expectancy is coupled with lower or significantly lower death rates than the Hungarian.
The takeaway?
All these suggest that the health state of the population itself do not explain this size of the difference.
To illustrate this magnitude of the actual surplus loss of Hungary (~6K-~13K), it can be described if four towns worth knowing for a foreign visitor would cease to exist.
At the ‘lower end’ Velence, the capital of Velence Lake near Budapest (6,446 inhabitants), Sümeg with its 13th-century mountain top castle (6,186) and medieval castle games.
At the ‘higher end’ the school town Sárospatak (12,304) of the first progressive European educator, ‘the educator of the nations’, the Czech Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky) who wrote his two main works here: ‘Schola Ludus’, and ‘Orbis sensualium Pictus’ for teaching young.
The other example could be the capital of the largest lake in CEE, Lake Balaton, Balatonfüred (13,637) with the largest cardiological rehabilitation institute in Hungary, wherein November 1926, Rabindranath Tagore, the great Hindu poet, also found healing among other known patients.
During a four-year cycle, initiatives could be launched, while the effect takes time, obviously. But 31 years passed after the regime change. The question is what we learn from what Covid19 indicated about the social priorities for the years to come.
Thank you for reading this article.
