OP-ED

Brian Mefford: Ukraine fails vaccine test

Published April 7, 2021. Updated April 7 at 8:14 am

A curtain separates 57-year-old Vasyl Stefurak (L), a coronavirus patient, from the body of a patient who died on March 16 in the central hospital of Kolomyia, a city of 61,000 people some 580 kilometers southwest of Kyiv. The hospital is in the epicenter of the surge of COVID-19 infections in Ukraine. Kyiv and the western regions, that suffer the most, introduced lockdowns. Meanwhile, the pace of vaccination remains extremely low, with only 81,753 people vaccinated with the first of the two doses of the vaccine, and only one person receiving both doses, as of March 17.

Photo by Volodymyr Petrov

As Ukraine entered April 2021, the country was in its third lockdown phase since the Covid 19 pandemic began in spring 2020, and its second lockdown in the space of just three months. To date, at least 35,000 Ukrainians have died as a result of the pandemic.