COVID-19 a Year Later in Central Asia

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of a novel coronavirus that began in Wuhan, China, a global pandemic. Two days later, the virus was officially detected in Central Asia.

Kazakhstan reported its first two cases in Almaty in a pair of Kazakhs who had recently returned from Germany. Two days later, Uzbekistan confirmed its first case, imported from France. Three days after the Uzbek case was announced, Kyrgyzstan reported three cases in citizens recently returned from Saudi Arabia.

COVID-19 had arrived in Central Asia. Well, most of it.

Tajikistan did not confirm its first cases of the virus until April 30 and Turkmenistan has, to date, not reported a single case.

As the pandemic’s one-year mark passes over Central Asia, it’s worth recounting and reflecting on the course of the past, strange, year even if a real analysis remains out of reach. At the onset of the pandemic, regional observers had great cause to worry about Central Asia. The region is beset by a difficult combination of circumstances at the best of times: autocratic political atmospheres allergic to sharing bad news and operating transparently, rampant corruption, and poor healthcare systems. The region’s economies vary in their health and stability, but many people in the region work jobs not easily convertible to working from home.

And yet, Central Asia has seemingly not experienced the degree of pandemic devastation witnessed in more developed countries.

It’s important to note that we do not verifiably know all that much about the reality of the pandemic in the region. Regional governments do not have great records when it comes to transparency, and that provides room for reasonable doubts about official figures on top of the kinds of difficulties governments around the world have experienced in counting the virus’ victims.

Tajikistan’s late entry and early exit (Dushanbe claimed to be COVID-free as of mid-January) from the whole matter of the pandemic casts a shadow over its data in particular. And early on in the pandemic governments in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan wrestled with which patients to count – for example, leaving out those who died from pneumonia but who were never tested for COVID-19, despite circumstantial evidence that they were likely victims of it.

A policy recalibration of who to report as a COVID-19 case led to a near doubling of Kyrgyzstan’s case numbers on July 18, 2020. On July 17, the country had recorded 13,101 cases; the next day, the figure leapt to 24,606. A similar sudden leap occured in Kazakhstan around the same time. Nur-Sultan had been separating out asymptomatic cases, thus depressing its numbers and not reflecting the reality of the risk given that asymptomatic patients can still spread the virus.

As of late February, Central Asia had recorded more than 436,000 cases of COVID-19 and 5,325 deaths, with Kazakhstan accounting for the most cases (257,800) and Tajikistan the least (13,308).

Turkmenistan is living a virus-free fairytale and Tajikistan isn’t far behind it. It seems rather unbelievable, for example, that only 90 people have died from COVID-19 in Tajikistan.

After initial lockdowns and states of emergency, life in the region – in many ways – has returned to “normal” with the addition of masks being mandated in public and continued travel restrictions. Exactly how and why Central Asia dodged the worst-case scenarios is beyond the scope of a single article. Arguably it’s a combination of already-bad political and public health conditions, relatively small elderly populations (matched by large youth populations), and poor accountability mechanisms. Travel restrictions, which Central Asian and other states put in place early and have kept in place, may have also kept the region from importing new strains of the virus that have plagued other countries, like South Africa and the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, while the death toll as we know it today may be smaller in Central Asia than anticipated, the repercussions of the pandemic remain serious, particularly in the economic sector.

Tajikistan’s dependence on the ability of migrant laborers to get to Russia and Dushanbe’s dilly-dallying on confronting the virus have meshed into a massive problem for the country’s poorest. Most regular Tajik citizens still remain unable to travel to Russia for work, even if there are limited flights between the countries now. A lack of domestic jobs has, for most of the last three decades, prompted hundreds of thousands of Tajiks to migrate for seasonal work in Russia and Kazakhstan, primarily. The pandemic did not fix Tajikistan’s employment problems, and the lack of remittances in 2020 and 2021 is liable to plunge many who had climbed out of poverty back into it.

Beyond the immediate economic repercussions are the possible political repercussions. Kyrgyzstan’s political crisis wasn’t directly about COVID-19, but the pandemic certainly contributed to the ambient atmosphere of discontent with the government that undergirded the October events. In Tajikistan, the uncertainty of the pandemic likely delayed an anticipated handover of power between father and son, keeping Emomali Rahmon in the presidency until a better opportunity presents itself for power transition.

The pandemic might provide suitable grievances for the dissatisfied in Central Asia, particularly if the government line is markedly different from the lived experience of people. On the other hand, that the region fared so well, if that is indeed the reality, may serve to boost confidence in the benefits of autocratic governance in Central Asia, especially when compared (fairly or not) to turmoil in democratic states both near (Kyrgyzstan) and far (the United States) and in light of pandemic “success” in other autocracies, like Vietnam and China.

One huge difficulty is that measuring the economic and social impact of the virus in Central Asia is almost impossible without greater distance in time (and more, and more reliable, data). If, as many analysts assume, Central Asian states have been undercounting cases and deaths (whether purposefully or unintentionally), such statistics won’t necessarily show up until the region’s states run a census or otherwise take an accounting of population (say, via tax or voting records). Even these measures will be incomplete, but will be another data-point worth considering when we look back on this period.

Uzbekistan was set to carry out its first national census since 1989 in 2022, after a trial run in 2021. But it’s already been pushed back to 2023. Kazakhstan, which runs a census every 10 years last did so in 2009 and was scheduled to do so in October 2020; Nur-Sultan delayed the census to 2021 on account of the pandemic. Kyrgyzstan conducted a census in the spring of 2020, just as the pandemic was getting underway so may not do another for some time (previous Kyrgyz censuses took place in 2009 and 1999).

Nevertheless, there have been brief glimpses already at the reality of COVID deaths in the region. Most recently, a pair of researchers – Ariel Karlinsky at Hebrew University in Israel and Dmitry Kobak at the University of Tübingen in Germany – built a dataset based on official mortality data from 77 countries around the world. In their World Mortality Dataset, they calculated the average total deaths per country from 2015 to 2019 for a baseline and then compared to reported death totals for 2020. Kazakhstan, according to their measure, had 22 percent more deaths in 2020 than the baseline, Kyrgyzstan had 19 percent more. In estimating the undercount ratio between excess deaths and official COVID-19 deaths Uzbekistan had the greatest discrepancy among the countries studied, followed by Tajikistan.

Ultimately, Central Asia has weathered the coronavirus pandemic on the surface, but we can’t really know how well until borders open (and journalists can go see for themselves and speak to people more freely) and more data is published.