Ukraine has registered 11,476 new cases of COVID-19 as of 9 a.m. on March 23. The total number of cases in the country since the start of the pandemic is 1.55 million.
A record 333 people with COVID-19 have died in the past 24 hours, while 8,044 have recovered. Over 1.27 million people have recovered from COVID-19 and 30,431 have died since the pandemic hit Ukraine.
There are currently 266,415 active cases in Ukraine.
In the past 24 hours, 2,519 people have been hospitalized with the disease.
Ukrainian laboratories have carried out 44,647 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, 21,526 antibody tests and 22,500 rapid antigen tests in the past day. Over 7.6 million PCR tests have been conducted in Ukraine since the start of the pandemic.
The largest numbers of new cases have been recorded in Odesa Oblast (1,122), the city of Kyiv (1,050), Lviv Oblast (995), Kharkiv Oblast (843), and Kyiv Oblast (727).
Starting March 20, Kyiv is under a lockdown in response to the rising number of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations. (See the lockdown restrictions)
The lockdown in Kyiv will run through April 9. Another large Ukrainian city, Lviv, introduced a two-week lockdown starting March 19. Mykolaiv, a southern city, introduced a lockdown on March 21.
Vaccination in Ukraine began on Feb. 24 and by March 22, a total of 121,928 people have received the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine produced by India’s Serum Institute. Only one person received two doses of the vaccine so far.
To date, Ukraine has received 500,000 doses of vaccine produced by India’s Serum Institute. Ukraine has ordered a total of 17 million doses from India, including vaccines developed by British-Swedish pharmaceutical AstraZeneca and U.S. biotech firm Novavax. Altogether, Ukraine expects to receive around 22 million doses in 2021.
On March 1, the Health Ministry started accepting online and telephone applications from Ukrainians who want to be put on the waiting list for the vaccine.
Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said that Ukraine’s vaccination drive was unacceptably slow. The government had planned for 10,000 vaccinations per day in the first weeks, while in reality, the pace was 5-10 times slower.
Meanwhile, Ukraine remains in adaptive quarantine, where each oblast is assigned one of four epidemiological levels, depending on the COVID-19 situation there. There are green, yellow, orange and red levels. A red status means that a lockdown will be imposed locally.
Eight regions are in the red zone – Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast, Zhytomyr Oblast, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Chernivtsy Oblast, Odesa Oblast, Zakarpattia Oblast and Sumy Oblast.
On March 4, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Ukraine has entered the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The prime minister didn’t rule out the possibility of another nationwide lockdown. Ukraine had had two nationwide lockdowns before: in March-May 2020, and in January 2021.