TIME magazine sings Greece’s praises over successful coronavirus handling

In a length investigative report published on 21 April TIME magazine has lionised Greek authorities for the country's spectacular success in drastically limiting the spread of coronavirus and keeping the death toll extremely low (116 at the time of writing).

The article, published on the magazine's website, begins with a description of one of the government's most painful decisions, maintaining the lockdown through Easter weeks, a time when in previous years passengers in well over 100,000 automobiles leave Attica for their ancestral homelands in the provinces.

"This year authorities monitored churches, enlisted street patrols, and deployed drones to enforce strict bans on movement amid a plethora of other measures taken to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

The authors note that experts say that both the stringency of those measures and the way Greeks have largely abided by them have been key to Greece avoiding the worst ravages of the global pandemic, and that Greece is second only to Italy in the percentage of elderly people in the population.

Success despite ravages of financial crisis

The article describes how the struggle to combat the pandemic is being waged against the backdrop of the economic destruction wrought by the decade-long economic crisis.

"[Greece's] health sector has been ravaged by austerity, and its crippled economy is still nearly 40% smaller than it was in 2008, before the last global financial crisis. Officials said in 2019 that, after three bailouts and drastic cuts to its public healthcare system due to austerity, there were only 560 ICU beds in the entire country of 11 million. (That's 5.2 beds per 100,000 people, compared to Germany's 29.2.)"

The piece also noted the turnaround of...