“It is possible that even our mobilized resources won’t be enough,” Minister of Health Arsen Torosyan said during an online meeting with the members of the Public Council. According to him, there are still extra hospital beds in rehabilitation units, but they are filling up. “The hospital beds are filling up quickly and they will be freed up slowly because the people who are staying in rehabilitation units either are in serious but stable condition or their condition slowly improves over the course of 20 days. And only citizens whose condition drastically deteriorates do not stay long because we are not able to save their lives.”
The minister said that there are strategies in place for the worst-case scenario, but that is the last thing anyone wants to take place. In that case, the entire healthcare system will be included in the process, including all hospitals, all rehabilitation units, and all doctors. According to Torosyan, it may be unavoidable as in most countries if Armenia continues to have high numbers. In such cases, the minister considers it to be inevitable that the number of medical professionals with the coronavirus will increase.
According to his data, 350 medical professionals have been infected with the coronavirus. Torosyan said that this could have negative consequences. “People being treated for other chronic illnesses in hospitals will become infected with the coronavirus and their already poor health condition will take a turn for the worse.”
Arsen Torosyan said that the main goal is to prevent this from happening and to keep the virus under control. Regarding having people go from being in quarantine to being in self-isolation, Torosyan said that this will require the work of many people. “We spent a lot of money and human resources on keeping people in hospitals. That was a very essential measure in preventing the spread of the virus because we had 1,000 cases solely from people in the hotels. So, we could have kept 1,000 people out of our sight and they would have spread the virus to other people, but we were able to prevent that from happening. Self-isolation will be the main tool, which is why there are several technical measures.”
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According to him, no one knows when all this will be over. “We will still need to work a long time to stop the spread of the virus since everyone has not been infected and recovered. Of course, deaths are inevitable. We do not have any medications that are meant to treat the coronavirus specifically and there are no medicines or vaccines on the horizon that will save us from all of this. There is little hope that there will be a vaccine within 1-2 years. A lot of time is needed for these methods to be tested and produced. In reality, everything will not improve in the next few months. It may be better in comparison, but it may also get worse.”
Lusine Budaghyan
