Hungary has fewer than 700 reported cases infected by the Coronavirus as of April 4, 2020. This is one of the lowest tallies in the European Union. Just in the span of one day after being less than 700 cases the quantity grew to 733 cases, New York Times says. But some doctors fear there’s only a small number of people reported with the virus because the government has only tested very few people. On Saturday Hungary completed less than 20,000 tests for the virus, which is still one of the lowest totals compared to the national proportion in the European Union. Hungary is having a hard time collecting data for this virus and keeping up with all of it at once.

The coronavirus began to spread through Hungarian territory nearly a month ago and was spread through clusters of people. Doctors there believed that the disease first started with Hungarian people that were coming back from a trip and managed to spread it so much because they were freely moving through the country. There is no exact way of knowing where it started and who started it in the country but it’s believed it was first introduced the second week of March, according to the New York Times. The World Health Organizer (W.H.O.) concluded that Hungary’s data is unreliable because there are such few people being tested for the virus. The main facility used for testing for the virus is St. Laszlo Hospital in Budapest. However, it was later found and reported by the New York Times that instead of helping to contain the disease, they were spreading it because the infected were around those who would’ve tested negative and spread it to them as well.  

Hungary put some restrictions on journalism in the country that the government deems fake. This made it harder to research the scale of the pandemic in Hungary. The New York Times states that many doctors are restricted to speak out in public about specific problems of the virus. Many hospitals are barred from releasing information to journalists. This is making it harder to get a good scale of Hungary’s pandemic state. Those journalists that can get some information are very wary about releasing it because it can be deemed as fake to the government.