Ukraine’s western Lviv Oblast has broken the daily record for new COVID-19 cases in a Ukrainian region, prompting alarm among local authorities.
Now, as Ukraine prepares to loosen quarantine restrictions on May 12, the region is trying to figure out how to bring COVID-19 under control.
After health care workers tested 315 people and registered 65 new COVID-19 cases in the oblast on May 7, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi announced an urgent meeting to decide how to respond to the rapid spread of the coronavirus.
“This is the biggest number today in Ukraine,” Sadovyi said on May 8. “We are gathering an emergency response team.”
Sadovyi said that he will announce steps oblast’s capital city will take after the meeting. In particular, the city or the oblast could choose not to ease quarantine measures on May 12.
Previously, the highest regional number of new cases was recorded on May 6, when Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa oblasts diagnosed 63 new cases. That day, Lviv Oblast registered 42 new cases.
“We are closely monitoring the dynamics of the disease,” Sadovyi said on May 6. “The decision to ease the quarantine measures will be made only if the dynamic declines.”
Overall, 660 people have been infected with COVID-19 and 18 have died in Lviv Oblast since the start of the pandemic. The most recent death occurred on May 7, when a 62-year-old man died four days after he was hospitalized with pneumonia symptoms.
Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast remains the place with the largest number of COVID-19 cases in Ukraine – 2,656 cases. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 14,195 people in Ukraine have contracted the disease, 2,706 people have recovered and 361 have died.
However, Lviv Oblast is located near the second largest regional cluster of COVID-19 cases as of the morning of May 8. It directly borders two of the oblasts with the most cases outside Kyiv Oblast: Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast (1,078 cases) and Ternopil Oblast (959 cases). Chernivtsi Oblast, which has the second largest case load with 2,097 confirmed infections, is not far away. All of these regions have smaller populations than Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast.
Mayor Sadovyi’s increasing alarm about coronavirus is a distinct break from his previous approach to the pandemic.
Back on April 29, he asked the government to allow local authorities to make their own decisions on easing quarantine measures, and urged Ukraine to open public parks, cafes with open terraces and small businesses like book stores and hair salons.
Ukraine is currently reporting roughly 500 new cases of COVID-19 a day. As of 9 a.m. on May 8, 504 new infections had been registered and Ukraine had carried out 7,763 polymerase chain reaction tests to detect COVID-19 in the past 24 hours. From April 7 to May 7, Ukraine has conducted 137,000 such tests.
