16:04,

YEREVAN, APRIL 10, ARMENPRESS. Healthcare Minister Arsen Torosyan has warned lawmakers at the parliamentary committee on health and social affairs against any potential changes or lifting of the current nationwide restrictions only because of the decreasing daily new cases.

“We cannot say that the transmission is stopping and is going away 100%. In the past, we were having 50 cases from a single cluster, for example 50 workers of a large factor, now we are having 16, 20 or 30 cases but from 10 or 20 different clusters. Therefore, the transmission of the virus in itself has gone out of control, but our objective is to find each and every potential case and carry out the same actions like before – test, confirm, isolate the direct contacts, treat and discharge. We must do this as much as we have the power to do it. When we will all, nationwide, get exhausted, that is only when we will be able to lift some actions and we will leave only the testing and treating, we won’t do the isolation, because it will be meaningless during a much higher outbreak,” Torosyan said.

Torosyan warned the lawmakers that the slowing growth in new cases is not a sufficient reason to lift the lockdown. He cited the practice of other countries as well.

The number of COVID-19 cases in Armenia has reached 937, of which 149 have recovered and 12 have died.

Reporting by Anna Grigoryan

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan