Government chooses intense inspections, communication over renewed lockdown

Ukraine’s cabinet determined at its June 19 daily
coronavirus meeting that returning to a severe quarantine/lockdown would also be
a severe hit respectively to the economy, the President’s Office said in a
statement the same day. Instead, the government will pursue “tighter
coordination in communications on quarantine measures with local governments
and the public,” the statement said. “We need to communicate more clearly on
what the adaptive quarantine is and how it affects the work of public places
and transport. So that there’s a clearly and detailed written plan on how
restaurants, beaches and night clubs are supposed to work. When people
understand this, they will uphold the adaptive quarantine more,” Zelensky said
during the meeting.

The cabinet website revealed on June 22 the details of
its June 17 decision to extend the quarantine/lockdown until July 31, which in
fact included the removal of many restrictions, including on the work of indoor
cafes and restaurants, shopping malls, cultural institutions, fitness centers
and hotels. However, these relaxations don’t apply to those regions that don’t
meet statistical requirements based on adequate rates of (1) infections (2)
available hospital beds, and (3) testing, the resolution said. Meanwhile,
prohibitions remain on being in public buildings and transport without masks,
being in public without identifying documents, conducting educational
activities in groups of 10 or more, children’s summer camps, among others.

The government will conduct wide-scale inspections, or
at least 10,000, of public dining facilities and public transport this week,
Communities Development Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov announced on June 22. The
inspections will check for violations of sanitary and epidemiological
requirements to combat the recent spread of the coronavirus that causes the
COVID-19 disease, he said. Inspections will be conducted in intracity and
interregional transport, as well as suburban rail and buses.

The latest protests flared on June 22 against the
government’s coronavirus policies. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city,
several dozen representatives of Chornobyl veteran organizations protested a
plan to allow their radiative medical care facility to accept COVID-19
patients. Meanwhile, a petition on the president’s website drew 25,000
signatures demanding an end to distance-based education at public schools and
their reopening in September. The chief medic at the Zakarpattia Infectious
Diseases Hospital, Mykhaylo Poliak, announced on June 20 that the region (which
borders Hungary) has no hospital beds left for COVID-19 patients. “Intensive
care units are full. In the last two weeks, the number of coronavirus patients
has grown in multiples. We will soon reach the point of not having any beds for
hospitalization,” he said.

Cases of the COVID-19 disease caused by the
coronavirus cooled to 681 on June 21, 735 on June 20 and 841 on June 19,
according to statistics of the National Security and Defense Council. An
estimated 10 COVID deaths occurred on June 21, eight on June 20 and nine on
June 19. Recoveries reached 133 on June 21, 103 on June 20 and 387 on June 19.

Zenon Zawada: The Zelensky
administration’s approach to the coronavirus this month has resembled its
approach to most other political challenges, which can be summarized as
populist-driven without consistent policy (and often contradictory). After
imposing an effective severe quarantine/lockdown, the government has made clear
it no longer wants to pay the political cost of extending it, especially when
rival politicians have been capitalizing on public impatience and hostility
ahead of the October local elections.

As a result, the government continued relaxing
quarantine measures last week amid swelling infection rates. Albeit, these
rates seem to have reached their pandemic peak on Thursday and Friday (921 and
841 respectively), having cooled to 681 new infections on June 21. So instead
of refraining from relaxation measures, the government has opted for
intensified inspections and fines (which had tripled on a daily basis as of
June 19, according to the president’s office).

This populist coronavirus approach will prove to be a
success if the infections continue to cool closer to a 500-600 daily case rate
this week. It will draw more public criticism if the daily rate remains above
600 cases by the end of the week.