The government is struggling with mass vaccination

HUNGARY - In Brief 10 Feb 2021 by Istvan Racz

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PM Orbán and his environment keeps proudly referring to the fact that in December 2020, exactly 4.5 million people were found by the Statistical Office in some sort of employment, only 14 thousand short of the level recorded one year earlier. That is a great achievement indeed, but unfortunately the number of people seen in one or the other category of part-time employment rose by 400 thousand in the meantime, and about a further 300 thousand earned significantly less and/or earned salary/wages out of the government budget, in the form of a wage subsidy.This does not mean too much good for consumption, GDP and the budget. In addition, the imminent risk is that the vaccination process may not be going rapidly enough to allow a reopening from the current lockdown regime before the tourism/travel season would normally start in April-May and speed up from June. Importantly, there is simply no way to reopen without rapid and major progress in vaccination, as the development of daily new infections simply would not allow such negligence. Even though the critical phase of Covid's second wave is now safely passed, the daily number of new infections and the positivity ratio of virus tests have started to increase again lately.Daily number of new Covid infectionsSource: koronavirus.gov.huBy comparison, the daily number of new infections is falling like a stone in the UK, the US and the whole of Europe in these days. But vaccination meaning the number of those who have recieved at least one shot already has reached 20% of the population in the UK and 10% in the US, and the corresponding number is only 3% in Hungary. The government is correctly complaining about the slow shipment ...