There Hasn’t Been a Single COVID Case in This Country

The health systems of so many countries across the globe are struggling to cope with the COVID pandemic. Since the very first outbreak of the virus, there has been a total of over 232.4 million cases of infections worldwide, according to data brought by worldometers.info.

But there’s one country out there that didn’t have to deal even with a single COVID case, or at least that’s what its government says, as CNN reveals. That country is Turkmenistan.

A population of roughly 6 million people

Turkmenistan has a population that counts about 6 million souls, and it’s not the only country that didn’t report any COVID infections. The other ones are some remote islands from the Pacific and North Korea.

Surprisingly or not, there are plenty of clues from activists and journalists outside Turkmenistan that the country is confronting the third wave of COVID infections. President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow is supposedly playing down the threat of the coronavirus for trying to maintain his public image.

Rachel Denber, who is deputy Europe and Central Asia director from Human Rights Watch, comes with a very reasonable question, as cited by CNN:

You look at what’s happening at other countries in the region and how different could Turkmenistan possibly be?

If we take a look at worldometers.info, we can easily see that Iran and Russia, which are neighbor countries with Turkmenistan, are among the top 10 most affected countries in the world by COVID. This fact alone should make us very skeptical regarding what the government of Turkmenistan claims.

Officials continue to add a lot of faith in COVID vaccines for stopping the ongoing pandemic. According to Our World in Data, only 44.4% of the entire planet’s population has received at least one of the needed doses of a COVID vaccine.