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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Health and Sanitation |
|---|---|
| located: | Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina |
| editor: | Katarina Panić |
A colleague of mine has diabetes. Her son is a hemodialysis patient. They didn't want to wait for the vaccination in their country since, in Bosnia, the immunisation is too slow. That is why they decided to apply online for a jab in Serbia.
They received their date. It was yesterday. It was about nine o'clock when she texted me that they just got the Sputnik V and that everything is organised perfectly.
"Now, I'm going to spend the rest of the day on Zelenjak (Zeleni venac - the well-known market in the middle of Belgrade). Long time no see. I missed it so much," she told me.
She lives in a town with some 80,000 inhabitants where the vaccination rollout started on 13 March, and by 30 March only 1,200 people received the first dose. More than 3,000 people over the age of 65 are on waiting lists. After they get vaccinated, the general population is about to start.
"At this pace, it is evident that this will not go fast. That is why I took a day off, and I'm going to do the same in three weeks for revaccination. It will cost me some 1,400 kilometres," she added.
According to Bosnia's border police, some 30,000 people crossed Serbia's border between 27 and 29 March - a 73 percent increase from the previous weekend. As Serbia had a lot of AstraZeneca vaccines with approaching expiration dates, it decided to open its vaccination centres for neighbouring countries too.
Meanwhile, other than Bosnia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Croatia and Albania seemingly did not respond to the challenge appropriately, and their citizens have been travelling en masse to Belgrade and other Serbian cities.
"Serbia is the leading country in Europe in the number of vaccinated Bosnians," a bitter joke circulates.
Many have remembered the smallpox epidemic of 1972 in Yugoslavia. Pilgrim Ibrahim Hoti brought the deadly disease from Iraq. And it took two months for the state to defeat the highly contagious virus, which was believed to have been eradicated in Europe in the 1930s.
Some 18 million people, or 90 percent of the population, have been vaccinated in only four weeks. Forty people died. The World Health Organization congratulated Yugoslavia on its excellent management of the epidemic.
"Such an undertaking would not be possible today. We have social networks where everyone is an expert," one of the comments reads.
Image: Sara Ristić.
