Critical care expert rues resignation to virus, lack of faith in science
Greeks have decided to ignore the science on Covid-19 and risk achieving herd immunity through widespread infection and, therefore, a large number of deaths, the head of critical care at one of Greece’s main coronavirus referral hospitals said on Tuesday.
“Basically, we’ve decided that 40 fatalities [a day] are okay,” Athens Medical School Professor of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine Theodoros Vassilakopoulos, who is also at the capital’s Evangelismos Hospital, told Skai television, citing data from the National Organization for Public Health showing more than 2,000 new cases of Covid-19 and over 30 deaths a day for the past weeks.
Greeks, he said, “only half-believe in science. We believe in miracles and mistrust doctors.”
The country’s response to the pandemic in the spring of 2020 “was not about faith in science, but fear. We’d seen was happening in Bergamo and were terrified,” Vassilakopoulos said, referring to the Italian region devastated by the first wave.
“You know what people avoiding vaccination believe? That the coronavirus won’t happen to me. They’ve signed a contract with God and won’t get sick,” he said.
“They are harming themselves and by harming themselves they are also harming society as a whole,” Vassilakopoulos said.
