How Greece Managed to Get It Right
It’s about swift action — and tapping into emotion
March 2020 was a roller-coaster month for Giota Lourida, MD, PhD, an infectious diseases senior consultant at Sotiria Chest Diseases Hospital of Athens, Greece. Lourida, who treated the first two first cases of coronavirus in Athens, says that when Sotiria became one of the three Athens hospitals dedicated to treating Covid-19 on March 20, the heavy inflows of people with severe breathing problems into the hospital brought with them fear and anxiety for the hospital staff: “The hospital reached full capacity in two weeks,” Lourida recalls. Soon, they were intubating one to two people per day, when pre-pandemic they would do the same in a week, and Lourida felt defeated. But in early April, the number of new arrivals showed signs of decline, and doctors began removing some patients from ventilators. “Our morale picked up. We had finally acquired experience and confidence,” Lourida says. By that point, it was obvious that Greece, Europe’s former black sheep, was fast on its way to becoming a global prototype for the successful management of the coronavirus crisis.
As of this writing, Greece has had 3,589 coronavirus cases,193 deaths, and 10 people on ventilators in ICUs. According to a report from Greece’s National Public Health Organization, between June 25 and June 30, the…
