MOSCOW, November 7. /TASS/. The Russian healthcare system provided a good response to the coronavirus pandemic, which kept improving over time, World Health Organization (WHO) Representative in Russia Melita Vujnovic said in an interview with TASS.
"As for Russia’s response to the novel coronavirus infection, one of the criteria that the World Health Organization uses to assess a country’s response to the pandemic, is the burden on the healthcare system and its ability to provide medical care to people. The flexibility that the Russian healthcare system showed by raising the number of hospital beds, providing assistance to all those who needed hospitalization and strengthening the primary healthcare system allows us to say that indeed, the response was good and it improved over time. Besides, there were no lengthy lockdowns except for the first one, which came at a time when lockdowns were declared across the world," she pointed out.
"The use of various measures to control the spread of the infection in society made it possible to keep the pandemic at bay. What does it mean? It means that in any case, fatalities were certainly rising but it also depended on the virus strain that was causing a peak in cases at a particular point," Vujnovic added.
However, the WHO envoy noted that the experience and the outcome of the pandemic were yet to be studied and assessed because the virus was changing very quickly. "Still, we can say that the system rapidly improved its response and there are good examples of the use of artificial intelligence, including computed tomography of the lungs and the entire healthcare system equipment," she went on to say. "There certainly are problems. But the crucial thing is that these problems are talked about openly at various expert meetings. What’s the goal? The goal is to find the best approach to overcoming it all and providing coronavirus treatment and all other routine services to patients. Clearly, sometimes it is very difficult to do it all at the same time," Vujnovic said.