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One year ago today, on March 1, 2020, the Czech Republic reported its first three confirmed cases of Covid-19. The government reacted quickly and resolutely to the threat of a pandemic, and for a time, the Czech Republic was considered a success story. Today, the country has among the highest coronavirus transmission and death rates in the entire world.

The Czech Republic has confirmed its friendly relations with Israel, becoming only the second EU country to open a branch of its embassy in Jerusalem. The office, staffed by a diplomat and an administrator, started operating on Monday, March 1. I discussed the importance of the move with Petr Kratochvíl from the Institute of International Relations, and begun by asking him about the reasons behind it:

Living as a foreigner in the Czech Republic during the coronavirus pandemic, does have its downsides. Those who spoke to Radio Prague International particularly stress the difficulty in visiting their families, but many also say that they have gotten used to living under lockdown. Several have noted that Czechs are disciplined, but distrust the government measures.

A year into the coronavirus pandemic, the Czech Republic has a higher per capita death toll than any other EU country. The nation is on the verge of another lockdown as cases soar, including of new, more aggressive mutations. Cardinal Dominika Duka recently spoke to Czech Radio about the fear, frustration and fatigue gripping the nation.

The Czech Republic’s annual Muriel Award for best comic book of the year was given to the graphic novel Bez vlasů or Without Hair. The autobiographical novel is a joint endeavour by writer Tereza Drahoňovská and Štěpánka Jislová and describes the struggles of living with alopecia, an autoimmune disease causing hair loss.

No Night So Dark is a new radio series set to premiere this Saturday. It tells the story of the Wels family, which lived in Western Bohemia and later Prague. Their past has since been brought back into memory thanks to the discovery of their archives, which shed remarkable light on what life was like in a Czech-Jewish family during the interwar period. To find out more, I spoke to the series creator David Vaughan, who has played an instrumental role in retelling the Wels family story through several formats. I began by asking him what format he chose for the seven part series.

In 1946, in the very first year of the famous Cannes Film Festival, the award for best short film went to the animated children’s short Animals and Bandits (Zvířátka a Petrovští). The film was the first international success not only for its creator, Jiří Trnka, but also for the newly founded studio Bratři v triku which had produced it. The golden age of Czech animated films had begun. In the years to come Czech animated films would influence generations of viewers the world over.

A live three-hour concert is due to take place on Saturday in the historic building of the National Theatre in Prague. Called Nation for Us – Culture for You, it will bring more than 200 performers to six different stages. The event will be broadcast live on Czech Television.

Czech researchers have developed a unique method to detect pancreatic and other forms of cancer that often go undiagnosed in time to be treated. Their method, based on the lipidomic profiling of human serum, can detect the disease by testing a single drop of blood.

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