HealthMin Mihaila: I have proposed coalition partners a series of measures to speed up vaccination campaign

The Minister of Health, Ioana Mihaila, on Tuesday stated that she proposed, during the meeting of the governing coalition, a series of measures to speed up the anti-COVID vaccination campaign, among which she proposed a reward for those who get the vaccine and also restrictions for the unvaccinated, mandatory testing of unvaccinated medical staff and limited access during the weekends to non-essential areas, noting that all these measures will be discussed with the Prime Minister and members of the National Committee Coordinating Vaccination Activities against Covid-19 (CNCAV). She added that the technical part will be established in the Government as soon as the PM agrees on it. "We are talking about two working hypotheses related to restrictions. We have, on the one hand, a legislative proposal for the medical staff, a proposal that has been discussed before, namely the obligation of testing for unvaccinated medical staff, which will turn into a law proposal depending on the decision and recommendations of the National Institute of Public Health and also depending on the level of incidence. Costs are not borne by the public system. The second restrictive measure is related to the access of unvaccinated persons on weekends in non-essential public areas," Mihaila explained, adding that the cost of the testing will be borne by the medical staff, and not by the system. The Minister of Health said that the method for making these measures operational will be detailed. "Some will come into force depending on the incidence level in each locality and we will discuss this with the CNSU (National Committee for Emergency Situations), DSU (Department for Emergency Situations) and INSP (National Public Health Institute) to establish these incidence thresholds, while others, such as these measures that address the medical staff, must be adopted in Parliament," Mihaila also said. Mihaila mentioned that, according to some partial data, in Bucharest, the vaccination rate of the medical staff is between 50 and 60pct and 85pct among the doctors. "Before this, we requested last week and started to centralize from the public health units what is the situation of the medical staff related to the vaccination stage. Most of us have partial results, but for example for Bucharest we have between 50 and 60pct of the staff being totally vaccinated, from partial data, the rate among doctors being over 85pct. AGERPRES (RO - author: Alina Novaceanu, editor: Florin Marin, EN - author: Cristina Zaharia, editor: Adina Panaitescu)