Associated Press writer Justin Spike has an interesting piece this morning looking at the difficulty of reporting on Covid in Hungary, and how some people argue that a paucity of official information is playing into low vaccination rates.
Although Hungary has secured vaccine doses from China and Russia in addition to those provided by the European Union, nearly a third of its adults still have not received a single shot. That hesitancy is something immunologist Andras Falus said can be partly attributed to official communications about the pandemic being “extremely poor, inconsistent and totally incapable of maintaining trust.”
“A significant proportion of the population no longer believes when they receive real data, or resign themselves to not paying attention to the data because they feel almost viscerally that it is inconsistent and unreliable,” said Falus, professor emeritus at Semmelweis University in Budapest.
Illes Szurovecz of the Hungarian news website 444.hu says the information released by the conservative government of Viktor Orbán does not provide a clear picture of how the outbreak is developing and that it is opaque and difficult to follow.
“There’s a lot we don’t know,” Szurovecz said. “If there was more detailed data, people would be better able to judge how severe the pandemic is and how dangerous the virus is. … Doctors from different parts of the country would be better able to compare their results and care could be improved.”
In lieu of more comprehensive data from official channels, Szurovecz and his colleagues track what few numbers the government releases and create detailed data visualizations on trends in the pandemic. Without that, he said, “it would be virtually impossible to look back in Hungary today and see how the pandemic has gone.”
Lacking official information on how hospitals are faring, many journalists have tried to report from inside Covid wards to get a clearer picture.
But Hungary’s government has barred journalists from entering medical facilities to report on the pandemic, and prohibited medical staff from giving interviews, something journalists say has made it impossible to report on worsening conditions, creating a false picture of the situation’s severity.
