Kyiv Mayor’s Coronavirus Update – August 28, 2020
28.08.2020
The mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko held a briefing providing an update on the coronavirus situation in Ukraine’s capital and the measures the city is taking to respond.
Klitschko: The number of соrоnаvіrus саses rоsе by 251 over the past 24 hours in Kyiv, totalling 12,719.
New cases include 139 women (18-92 years old), 101 men (20-80 years old) and 11 children. Infected are also ten medical professionals. There are 47 coronavirus hospitalisations among new cases.
Nine more deaths raise the death toll to 187. This is the highest number of virus-related deaths in a single day in Kyiv.
A total of 4,070 people have recovered, with 95 new recoveries overnight.
Darnytsky and Desniansky districts lead, both with 39 new infections.
The number of coronavirus hospital admissions continues to rise. Currently, there are 486 coronavirus hospitalisations in Kyiv, including 22 children. 101 in-patients are very ill, 14 of them are on a ventilator and 195 under oxygen therapy. Another 60 people were admitted to hospitals with a suspected diagnosis. There are also 893 active pneumonia cases that require hospitalisation, with 108 new ones overnight.
The municipality has expanded the bed capacity of the dedicated coronavirus health facilities and prepared the infectious disease units of another four municipal hospitals to new admissions. They are fully equipped to handle new cases.
Currently, there are enough medical workers to treat all coronavirus patients, including 75 infectologists, 510 other medical specialists, and 950 nurses and assistants.
But the infection spike and jump in hospitalisations may lead to a collapse of the public healthcare. The health systems of Italy, Spain or the United States have been unable to deal with a growing number of patients admitted to hospitals and requiring critical care.
Our own health and life depends on our awareness and alertness. Having the head in the sand and ignoring the threat is equal to welcoming the infection with open arms!
Talking about the school resumption, the city is intent on school reopening as of September 1, but with safety measures in place. With this in mind, we have committed over ₴30 million equipping schools and other education facilities with sanitising supplies.
The Kyiv healthcare authority has developed a list of safety measures under which schools will operate. Now, morning temperature screening for children and staff is mandatory. Teachers are required to enquire about their students’ health. Each school must redistribute pupils’ flows to avoid overcrowding. Classes would be routinely sanitised twice a day and aired.
Each school has a detailed symptom checker to help detect the coronavirus disease and guidelines on how to act accordingly. A decision to quarantine schools with coronavirus clusters lies with the healthcare authority. Additionally, I would like to ask parents to monitor their children’s health and let the sick students stay home and not attend the school.
There are still many travel-related cases of COVID-19 transmission. As you may know, international travellers who test positive are required to download an Act Home tracking application no later than 24 hours after their travel. But during this time such individual can come into contact with plenty of people.
On our recommendation, to improve the public safety the national government has allowed to share the obtained information with the municipal COVID-19 Response Monitoring Centres. Furthermore, we suggest to enforce the contact tracing and make this application mandatory for all people who hаvе bееn аrоund sоmеоnе with COVID-19. Such a step will help track down the possible clusters and prevent the virus sharp spikes.
We continue to disinfect the public transport fleet, metro trains and streets twice a day. Every day 55 municipal service trucks and 140 municipal workers thoroughly disinfect the city’s streets and roads, public transport vehicles and stops with special solvents. The municipal fleets are also being regularly sanitised.
Metro has also stepped up the safety measures across the whole network and enhanced the disinfection of all highly touched surfaces, including handles, escalator handrails and support poles.
The public transport is a zone of higher virus exposure and passengers must obey the health rules, wear masks and observe social distancing advice.