Because of quarantine and pandemic fatigue in the population, the new minister of health wants to ease restrictions this summer.
Ukraine’s new Minister of Health, Viktor Lyashko, has said that the quarantine is likely to be eased this summer, because the Ukrainians are getting tired of living under the sometimes heavy restrictions.
“There is quarantine fatigue, pandemic fatigue now. Therefore, when the epidemic situation gets stabilized, certain re-opening, certain easing is possible,” Lyashko said on TV according to Unian.
He is the second minister to promise letting the COVID 19 guard down. Earlier, Minister of Culture Oleksandr Tkachenko said that concerts and mass events would soon be possible again, Unian writes.
Contrast to Stepanov
Lyashko replaced former Minister of Health, Maxim Stepanov, earlier this month. Stepanov was the minister through the entire pandemic, and in contrast to Lyashko, he was almost always calling for more restrictions.
Last time Stepanov called for tougher quarantine restrictions was in March, where he asked the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, to further toughen up the measures to combat the spread of the virus.
Stepanov was fired as a minister exactly because of the COVID situation in Ukraine, and in part because of the slow start with vaccinations. This fact makes his successors remarks quite surprising.
Today, 1022 new cases of coronavirus was registered in Ukraine. However, only 8800 PCR tests were conducted in the past 24 hours, making the number largely useless in terms of tracking the state of the spread of the virus.
