There is a certain lie the COVID-skeptics in Poland tell. Last year, due to the pandemic medical system overload, the ministry of health ordered medical providers to suspend in-person consultations and to prioritize treating COVID patients over non-threatening medical conditions. This was done in part to protect doctors, who were direly needed everywhere, and in part to make more room for people with COVID.
When the statistical office later announced over 120,000 more people died in Poland than in a typical year, the COVID-skeptics used that medical system ordinance as a convenient excuse: "it was not COVID which is that deadly, it's the fact that people with other conditions could not see their doctor!". To be fair, there is some truth to it - surely there are people who are now in later stages of cancer, for example, because their doctor could not have caught it on a routine in-person visit. But the COVID skeptics just do not accept that this is exactly one of the challenges with COVID - even if there was no ordinance like that, these doctors would still have to fight COVID - or they would have to let COVID patients die while tending to other patients.
This year, however, we can expose their lies. Once vaccines became widely available, the west of the country, especially big cities, quickly embraced them and people there got vaccinated. This was not true in the east, where even among the elderly, less than 60% are vaccinated. This provided a real-life A/B test opportunity.
Poland registers now just as many COVID cases as the same time last year (actually, it's on the way to exceed that number this week). But the number of deaths in the west increased only slightly compared to a multi-year average, while the number of excess deaths in the east continues to climb. The east has been in a COVID wave since October, and many COVID-skeptics and anti-vaxxers predicted that it's a seasonal wave that will soon move westward in the country, while the east will experience less new cases and deaths. And while it is true that the number of cases rises very fast all across the country, the number of deaths does not rise that much in the west of Poland.
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