The Ukrainian capital Kyiv will tighten lockdown restrictions due to a spike in coronavirus cases, mayor Vitali Klitschko said at a televised briefing on Thursday.
From Monday, cafes, restaurants, gyms, shopping and entertainment facilities will only be allowed to operate if all staff are vaccinated, he said. At the same time, these institutions are prohibited from accepting visitors who do not have vaccination certificates or negative COVID-19 tests.
A negative COVID-19 test or vaccine certificate will also be mandatory to use public transport.
Ukraine’s health minister urged more people to get their COVID-19 shots as coronavirus deaths hit a daily record of 734 on Tuesday, with hospitalisations up more than a fifth on the previous week.
Fake vaccine certificates
A Ukrainian police video shows a doctor seated at his desk while a masked officer counts bundles of cash found stashed in the office: $12,000 worth in total.
The televised raid this week on a doctor’s surgery in the Khmelnytsky region is one of the hundreds of criminal investigations publicized by the authorities in a clampdown on a flourishing black market in forged vaccine and COVID-19 test documents.
After a lull in the summer, Ukraine is experiencing some of the highest death rates from COVID-19 in the world.
One of Europe’s poorest countries, Ukraine lagged behind its neighbors in procuring vaccines earlier this year. Now, as in other former communist states in eastern Europe, it is struggling to persuade a skeptical population to take them.
Only around 7 million Ukrainians out of a population of 41 million are fully jabbed against COVID-19 and surveys suggest around half of adults do not want to be vaccinated.
The government has made the shots compulsory for some state employees, and unvaccinated citizens face restrictions getting into restaurants and sporting events. The new rules have prompted more people to get vaccinated but also provided more incentives for those who do not want vaccines to get fake ones.
Tetyana Mykhailevska, head doctor at the infectious diseases department at Kyiv hospital number 3, said fake vaccination certificates were prolonging the pandemic, and buying them was “now probably the worst crime committed against the country and our society.”
“We are tired of this pandemic. We want to be ordinary doctors. I am, for example, a cardiologist. I want to be a cardiologist, not a COVID doctor. I want to have a good sleep instead of answering night calls by my terrified patients,” she told Reuters.
