A Hard Rain on a Bad Roof
This past July, as the Georgian summer approached its height, and Tbilisi sweltered, it was clear the country had learned to live with Covid-19. Things had pretty much gone back to normal despite a five-fold rise in infections between one week and the next; numbers had risen from 100 to 500 infections per week, and almost doubled in the capital. (Why the spike? This is pure speculation but there had been two large protest rallies and a pop festival in Tbilisi in the ten days before.) Nonetheless, the health secretary, Zurab Azarashvili, pronounced the epidemiological situation in Georgia ‘calm’ and ‘fully manageable’—and indeed that seemed an altogether fair assessment given that in that preceding fortnight, deaths had been down to between one and three.
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