A cascade of causes that led to the COVID-19 tragedy in Italy and in other European Union countries

摘要

The perception of the COVID-19 pandemic in my homeland Croatia has been based on two main sources of information over the past three weeks. On the one hand, our Civil Protection Headquarters, as well as all of the experts and scientists to whom media space has been provided, called for caution, but without any panic. They emphasized that this was not a cataclysm, but an epidemic involving a serious respiratory infectious disease. The cause of this disease is the new coronavirus, for which we do not have a vaccine. Therefore, it can be expected that the disease will be very dangerous for the elderly and to those who are already ill. So, it was an unknown danger worthy of caution, but our epidemiologists remained calm. They knew that they would be able to estimate the epidemic’s development using data and then control the situation with anti-epidemic measures, and through several lines of defence [1].