Kazakhstan seems to have been hit the hardest, with officials reporting about 8,000 cases daily in early August, four times the number the country was reporting in August 2020 .
Tajikistan has grudgingly admitted the coronavirus is spreading again, after earlier this year Tajik officials declared they had beaten the virus and it was no longer present, and Turkmenistan, in defiance of reason, clings to its tale that there has never been coronavirus in the country.
On this week’s Majlis Podcast, RFE/RL media-relations manager Muhammad Tahir moderates a discussion on the latest wave of COVID in Central Asia, how bad is it, and what have the countries learned in the months that have passed since the virus first appeared.
This week’s guests are: from Kazakhstan, Baurzhan Zhussupov, research coordinator at the Kazakh National Medical University in Almaty; from Bishkek, Aibek Mukametov, the head of the health-care program at the Soros Foundation in Kyrgyzstan; from Prague, Farruh Yusupov, the director of RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, known locally as Azatlyk; and Bruce Pannier, the author of the Qishloq Ovozi blog.
