MOSCOW, April 30. /TASS/. World Health Organization (WHO) representative to Russia Melita Vujnovic believes that it will be possible to ease lockdown measures imposed to curb the spread of coronavirus if the trend of decreasing infection rates holds up in the country, she said Wednesday.

"I am very glad that in the past 10 days we’ve been witnessing lower [infection] rates, while today in Moscow we saw a significant drop in cases. Of course, it should be very carefully tracked in the next two weeks and then we will hopefully enter the phase when restrictive measures can be gradually eased," she noted.

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the nation, declaring May 6,7 and 8 non-working days which means that Russia will stay in lockdown until at least May 12. Putin noted that the restrictive measures should be strictly adhered to in this period.

In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus - named COVID-19 by the WHO - have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia.

On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 3,100,000 people have been infected worldwide and more than 218,000 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 959,700 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.

To date, a total of 99,399 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Russia, with 10,286 patients having recovered from the virus. Russia’s latest data indicates 972 fatalities nationwide. Earlier, the Russian government set up an Internet hotline to keep the public updated on the coronavirus situation.