Coronavirus – Orbán: ‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst’

“Hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in connection with the novel coronavirus epidemic in a public radio interview on Friday.

Orbán told Kossuth Radio the time had not yet come when it was possible to relax restrictions. The prime minister said it wanted people’s lives to return to normal but he dare not tell them to relax.

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Looking to Austria, he added, if some restrictions are lifted there without a corresponding increase in infections, then Hungary will also consider easing some of them.

Meanwhile, Orbán said it was inevitable that special rules for Budapest would have to be introduced.

He noted that 60 percent of infections are in Budapest, while this figure rises to 80 percent taking Budapest and Pest County together.

He said the peak was “still ahead of us” and the hard part was just about to arrive, with the number of Covid-19 cases likely to accelerate in the coming days. “We’re entering a period of mass infections,” he said, adding however that a sufficient number of hospital beds, ventilators, and health-care staff would be available to handle it.

The preventative measures implemented so far have allowed Hungary to buy time and prepare hospitals for coping with the outbreak, Orbán said. “Our stocks are full,” he said, adding that hospitals and nursing homes have received enough supplies to last 10 days.

“We have the ammunition needed in this war-like situation,” the prime minister said, adding that supplies were constantly being restocked.

Concerning the government order to hospitals to vacate a proportion of their beds, Orbán pointed out that just ten coronavirus cases in each of Hungary’s more than a thousand elderly care homes would result in 10,000 people in need of hospital care.

The aim is to have 8,000 functioning ventilators and more than 30,000 hospital beds for treating Covid-19 patients in the event of a worst-case scenario, Orbán said, conceding that it was not easy to create the conditions to treat such a large number of patients.

He added, at the same time, that since 34 percent of Hungary’s 68,000 hospital beds had been unoccupied, only 16 percent of patients waiting for non-urgent surgery had to be sent home. These “difficult decisions” were made on the basis of guidelines issued by a medical board, he said, emphasising that “there is no other way to resolve this issue”.

“We’re right in the middle of a military-like operation,” Orbán said, adding that this came with certain inconveniences.

The prime minister praised the efforts of hospital directors, doctors and nurses in their fight against the virus. Concerning the decision to appoint so-called hospital commanders to oversee hospitals, he said: “Our hospital directors are also doing a good job, but indeed, finances weren’t as tight in peace time as they’d be expected to be during an epidemic, so it was necessary to appoint hospital commanders.” Hospital directors normally have a high degree of autonomy, he said, adding, however, that they had a duty to comply with the decisions of the operative board coordinating the response to the epidemic.