News

A public dispute over Covid-19 has erupted among Czech medical professionals in recent days, after a group of prominent doctors signed a public petition demanding the government stop scaring people. Among the signatories are Ladislav Fiala, head of the Czech Medical Homeopathic Society, heart surgeon Jan Pirk, psychiatrist Radkin Honzák and Roman Šmucler, chairman of the Dental Chamber.

The petition says in part, “We see a much greater danger to the overall health of the people stemming from drastic government measures than from the coronavirus as such.” More than 51,000 people have signed their petition over the past six days, Czech Radio reports.

Minister of Health Roman Prymula – an epidemiologist – said he found the petition drive to be “completely irresponsible” noting that none of the doctors behind are experts in the field. He wrote on Twitter that they do not understand the basic facts, noting “In the last month, the number of deaths per day has increased tenfold from 2 to 20”.

Prymula is due to announce a raft of stricter measures on Friday aimed at containing the spread of coronavirus. Meanwhile, Chamber of Physicians head Milan Kubek called on Czechs to act responsibly and respect measures. In an open letter, Kubek said that the current uptick is very worrying and arose due “to our carelessness, as well as to mistakes made by political leaders”.

The Communist Party leadership will officially resign from their posts at their next executive committee meeting, chairman Vojtěch Filip told reporters on Tuesday. The announcement comes in the wake of the largely unreformed party’s poor results in regional and first-round senatorial elections last weekend.

However, Filip did not rule out that he would run for chairman again at the Communist Party congress scheduled for November. The Communist Party won 4.8 percent of the vote in the Czech regional elections and lost all but 13 of their 86 seats in regional assemblies. None of their candidates have advanced to to the second (run-off) round in the Senate elections, to be held this weekend.

The Museum of the Bohemian Paradise in Turnov has received the main Gloria Musaealis prize in a national competition for its new exhibition on mountaineering, created within a cross-border cooperation programme supported by EU funds.

The exhibition, called ‘Mountaineering - from the Bohemian Paradise to the Peaks of the World’ was conceived in partnership with a German museum in Bad Schandau, Saxony, in which a smaller exhibition entitled ‘Climbing Worlds in the Elbe Sandstone’ was created.

In the Exhibition of the Year category, the South Bohemian Museum in České Budějovice won with its new exhibitions on nature, archaeology and folklore. In total, 60 museums with a total of 87 projects took part in the competition.

There were 4,457 newly detected cases of Covid-19 in the Czech Republic on Tuesday, the highest one-day jump in numbers since the first cases were recorded in the country on March 1. A record number of new cases, 856, were recorded in the capital.

Over 90,000 cases have been registered in the Czech Republic in total and the number currently affected is 40,440, according to official Ministry of Health data. Thirteen people died with the coronavirus on Tuesday, bringing the total number of deaths to 794. Minister of Health Roman Prymula is due to announce a raft of new measures on Friday aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus.