KIEV, August 19. /TASS/. Ukrainian healthcare workers over the past 24 hours registered a record number of the coronavirus infections - 1,967, which surpasses the tally of the previous day of 1,616 by almost 22%, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council reported on Wednesday.
According to its data, over the past 24 hours due to the complications caused by the novel coronavirus "28 people died and 812 patients have recovered."
As Ukraine’s Health Minister Maxim Stepanov reported at a briefing on Wednesday, over the past 24 hours the healthcare workers conducted 19,591 PCR tests, 10% of which were positive. The majority of new infections were recorded in the Kharkov Region - 247, Kiev - 215, the Lvov Region - 188, the Ivano-Frankovsk Region - 163 and the Chernovtsy Region - 154.
According to the minister, a daily record high of 463 hospitalized patients has also been set in Ukraine. "You see that the coronavirus gains momentum. We have seen this trend for the past month. We have crossed very quickly the divide of a thousand new cases per day and now we are already approaching two thousand," the minister said, reiterating the necessity to follow the quarantine rules.
Since the beginning of the epidemic in Ukraine the number of confirmed coronavirus infections reached 96,403, with 2,144 fatalities and 49,737 recoveries. Over this time the healthcare workers conducted 1,335,000 PCR tests with 7.2% of them detecting the presence of the virus.
Ukraine confirmed its first COVID-19 case on March 3 in the Chernovtsy Region. The government imposed a lockdown on March 17. Since August 1, new rules of adaptive quarantine were introduced: the country’s regions are divided into four zones with different restrictions depending on the epidemiological situation. On August 12, the government updated the criteria for introducing or cancelling quarantine restrictions in each of the regions of Ukraine. Their number was reduced from four to three, and the requirements were clarified.
In late December 2019, Chinese officials informed 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 22,324,000 people have been infected worldwide and more than 784,000 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 15,000,000 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.
To date, 937,321 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Russia, with 749,423 patients having recovered from the disease. Russia’s latest data indicates 15,989 fatalities nationwide. Earlier, the Russian government set up an Internet hotline to keep the public updated on the coronavirus situation.