Ukrainian doctors have identified five cases of coronavirus among foreign students living in a dormitory of Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design, Mayor Vitali Klitschko announced during a briefing on July 13.
The nationalities of the students have not been revealed.
According to Klitschko, two students have been hospitalized. The other three are in self-isolation. The students had contact with 13 other people, six of whom have not yet been located, Ukraine’s state consumer protection service said.
Valentina Chernenko, a spokesperson for the service, told the Kyiv Post that the agency had appealed to the National Police because the dormitories had violated sanitary norms imposed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. However, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Education said the norms were recommendations.
The Kyiv Post called the dormitory by phone, but an employee who answered denied reports of a COVID-19 outbreak and refused to comment on the matter.
The infections at the dormitory are the latest outbreak in communal housing since the pandemic reached Ukraine over four months ago.
Too close for comfort
Ukrainian dormitories — both those for students and ones that offer inexpensive lodgings to the wider public — have become hotspots for the coronavirus because they lack protective equipment and residents share rooms with communal bathrooms and kitchens. That makes them inherently high-risk places where the virus can spread quickly.
On April 27, a COVID-19 outbreak was discovered in another dormitory outside Kyiv, where most of the 152 residents were international students. According to the Kyiv Oblast authorities, six students contracted the disease.
When Ukrainian doctors detected one COVID-19 case at Kyiv’s Glier Institute of Music on March 17, over 50 students, including 24 from abroad, were isolated and left with almost no food or drinking water.
“They have to boil tap water (to drink),” one of the university professors said.
Small outbreaks of COVID-19 have been identified in dormitories across Ukraine. Three cases were reported in a dormitory in Zhytomyr on May 5. Fifteen people, including six children, were infected in a dormitory in Zaporizhia in April.
A massive outbreak of 37 cases of COVID-19 struck one of the dormitories in Vyshneve, a town in Kyiv Oblast, on April 21. Two people died of the disease.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, students in dormitories — particularly foreigners who could not return to their home countries — say they do not feel safe and have to rely on the local government for support.
There are over 80,000 international students from 158 countries studying in Ukrainian universities. Most come from India, according to Ukraine’s State Center for International Education.
Speaking to the Kyiv Post in May, students complained about not being able to maintain social distancing in their dormitories.
Under quarantine rules, university dormitories should be disinfected every day. However, multiple students from different universities told the Kyiv Post that cleaners did not come every day and, when they did, they didn’t disinfect the rooms properly.
Now, international students in Ukraine feel much safer.
“We don’t have classes here and we need to go out only for food,” Saurav Kumar, a first-year student from India at Vinnytsia Medical University, told the Kyiv Post on July 13.
He said that many students cannot return to India because tickets are expensive and COVID-19 cases there are increasing every day.
Students are also worried about starting their next semester, because they do not know whether it will be online or offline.
“We are very confused about what will happen,” Kumar said.
