Ukraine has registered 14,984 new cases of COVID-19 as of 9 a.m. on April 17, bringing the total number of cases in the country since the start of the pandemic to over 1.9 million.
In the past 24 hours, 9,736 COVID-19 patients have recovered and 440 have died.
Over 1.4 million people have recovered from COVID-19 and 39,536 have died since the pandemic hit Ukraine.
Ukrainian laboratories have carried out 45,875 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests and 20,127 antibody tests in the past 24 hours. Over 8.8 million PCR tests have been conducted since the start of the pandemic.
The largest numbers of new cases have been recorded in the city of Kyiv (1,609), Kharkiv (1,377), Lviv (1,365), Dnipropetrovsk (1,332) and Odesa (1,315) oblasts.
In the past 24 hours, 4,100 patients were hospitalized with COVID-19. On average, 4,500-5,000 Ukrainians per day were taken to the hospital with the coronavirus in March and April.
Ukraine’s health system can handle no more than 7,000 daily hospitalizations, deputy health minister and chief sanitary doctor Viktor Lyashko said on April 10.
Vaccination in Ukraine began on Feb. 24 and by April 16, a total of 445,859 people have received the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine produced by India’s Serum Institute. Only five people received two doses of the vaccine so far; 13,044 people were vaccinated in Ukraine on April 16.
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. As of April 14, Ukraine is in the second stage of the vaccination campaign, inoculating medical staff, military, and people over 80 years old. However, people who fall outside these categories may be able to receive leftover doses.
On April 13, Lyashko announced the start of vaccinating Ukrainian citizens with the Chinese Coronavac vaccine. Ukraine currently has 215,000 doses of it and expects to receive 1,7 million doses more.
Only certain groups can get a Coronavac jab, including people with disabilities and those who take care of them, Ukrainians involved in organizing university entrance exams, Olympic and Paralympic athletes and police officers.
Starting April 14-15, Ukraine will distribute 117,000 doses of U.S. Pfizer vaccine to nursing homes, customs employees and emergency services.
On March 20, Kyiv imposed a lockdown in response to the rising number of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations. On April 5, the capital shut down all schools and kindergartens. Public transport, including the subway, allows only passengers who work in critical infrastructure, with special permits from the city.
The Kyiv city administration announced that it’s extending quarantine restrictions in the capital until April 30.
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.
Twelve regions are in the red zone – Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast, Zhytomyr Oblast, Zaporizhia Oblast, Lviv Oblast, Mykolaiv Oblast, Poltava Oblast, Odesa Oblast, Sumy Oblast, Kharkiv Oblast, Khmelnytsky Oblast, Chernihiv Oblast and Chernivtsi Oblast.
