The start of May is finally bringing some good news to Kyiv.
The six-week lockdown ends on May 1, in time for Easter and traditional May holidays.
“The situation in Kyiv improved by every measure,” Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said on April 27.
It’s not just Kyiv. Ukraine is beginning to exit the third wave of the pandemic, according to Stepanov.
The daily number of new cases that peaked in early April, reaching 20,000 cases a day, went down to about 12,000 in late April.
The other important metric, the number of hospitalized COVID‑19 patients, went down from 48,000 in early April to 36,000 in late April. In Kyiv, the decrease was even more rapid — from 5,000 to 3,000 people.
Yet another reason for optimism came from a spike in COVID‑19 vaccination.
After having been inoculating a meager number of 15,000 people a day on average, Ukraine unexpectedly vaccinated 70,000 people on April 28, giving hope that the country’s vaccination campaign is finally taking off.
Restrictions lifted
The end of the lockdown lifts almost all quarantine restrictions in Kyiv: Restaurants and cafes open up, but have to close at midnight; stores, malls, cinemas and gyms reopen; public transport is accessible to everyone; schools and kindergartens reopen.
Some restrictions remain. Mass gatherings indoors are limited to give each visitor at least four square meters of space. Mask wearing remains mandatory in all public spaces and public transport.
It was the third time that Kyiv shut down to curb the rising infections, after two nationwide lockdowns in March-May 2020 and January. The capital, with the rest of Ukraine, also saw weekend lockdowns in November.
In January and November, lockdowns yielded a decrease in the number of daily infections. In March-May 2020, the lockdown slowed the spread of the virus to Ukraine and allowed the health care system to prepare for the inflow of patients. Still, it came close to collapsing a year later.
As Kyiv eases restrictions, nine Ukrainian regions remain under lockdown: Kyiv Oblast, Zhytomyr Oblast, Zaporizhia Oblast, Mykolaiv Oblast, Poltava Oblast, Sumy Oblast, Kharkiv Oblast, Khmelnytsky Oblast and Chernihiv Oblast.
As much as it is welcome by those tired of restrictions, the timing is controversial.
The lockdowns in big cities, including Odesa and Lviv, are being lifted as Ukraine goes into a holiday-heavy period. May 1 and May 9 are official holidays, and Orthodox Easter is celebrated on May 2. Ukrainians will have two long weekends: May 1–4 and May 8–10.
Many expected that the lockdown in Kyiv will be prolonged to cover the May holidays. Lifting the restrictions may lead to more infections as people get together to celebrate.
Additional risk comes from the fact that many Ukrainian families will head to the cemeteries on May 8–9 for the remembrance days that come one week after Easter. In 2020, authorities closed down cemeteries and rescheduled the remembrance days to avoid crowds. But this year, there are no limitations in most of Ukraine.
Optimism for vaccine
After dragging its feet for two months, Ukraine’s vaccination campaign may finally be taking off.
Although Ukraine started vaccinating its citizens on Feb. 24, it gave the first doses of the vaccine to just 629,182 people, as of April 29. Only 10 Ukrainians received the necessary two doses.
The gap is due to the fact that the main vaccine Ukraine is using is AstraZeneca. For it, a 12-week gap between the first and second doses is recommended.
It means that the number of fully vaccinated people will start rising rapidly in mid-May, 12 weeks after Ukraine started vaccinating its citizens.
The welcome spike in the number of daily vaccinations — from 19,590 on April 27 to 70,468 on April 28 — is linked to the latest delivery of 367,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines from South Korea on April 23.
Responding to criticism over slow vaccination, health care officials decided to use the new batch to give it a quick boost.
“We want to use up the whole batch in two or three days to demonstrate the full capacity of the medical system,” said Deputy Health Minister Viktor Lyashko.
At the same time, it means that Ukraine currently doesn’t have AstraZeneca vaccines to administer the second doses. Ukraine booked more vaccines from India, but the country, currently battling one of the worst coronavirus crises in the world, is delaying all export supplies, prioritizing inoculating its own population.
Help may come from the west. Poland, which booked more vaccines than its population needs, will deliver 1.2 million doses of AstraZeneca to Ukraine in May or June.
That’s around the same as the total number of all vaccines that Ukraine received so far.
