By Gleb Garanich
OVRUCH, Ukraine (Reuters) – “As soon as I recover, I will have to be vaccinated,” says Halyna, one of 75 COVID patients in a Ukrainian city hospital whose doctors are pushing the message that vaccination is the best way to keep local people out of the wards.
Mistrust in vaccines is widespread in Ukraine. Several years ago it led to an outbreak of measles and today it puts thousands in hospital with COVID.
Health minister Viktor Lyashko said on Wednesday that 92% of COVID patients in Ukrainian hospitals are unvaccinated and the country could have a third fewer deaths every day if its vaccination rate matched the European average.
Ukraine has registered record coronavirus cases and deaths in recent weeks, and the government has imposed strict lockdowns and promoted vaccination in an attempt to fight back.
The ministry has registered 3.1 million cases and 74,206 deaths since the start of the pandemic, with almost 5,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the last seven days.
“Vaccination, of course, is the solution,” said Viktoria Lypkivska, chief doctor in the infectious diseases department at the Ovruch city hospital in central Ukraine.
“We see that vaccinated people get sick less severely, they go to hospital less often,” she added.
Ukraine is one of several countries in eastern Europe where vaccination rates are among the continent’s lowest.
According to the health ministry, Ukraine fell behind in the race for vaccine supplies this year and so far only around 8.2 million in a population of 41 million are fully vaccinated.
Most of those admitted to the Ovruch hospital are elderly people at the highest risk of infection, but doctors say many have not been vaccinated.
“I’m not vaccinated. I thought I’ve already had so many years – I’m 80 years old,” said patient Maria Hvozdikova.
(Additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Natalia Zinets in Kyiv; writing by Pavel Polityuk; editing by Giles Elgood)
