Romania has more than 300 local outbreaks of coronavirus in retirement homes and at companies which are under control, but authorities may take more drastic measures in the future if cases rise exponentially.
Raed Arafat, who heads the emergency services, said the outbreaks “are very limited and under control” at the moment.
Arafat, chief of the Emergency Situations Department, explained that authorities put towns and villages under quarantine when there was community transmission meaning a significant number of Coovid-19 infections but not localized in a single place, such as an elderly people’s home.
“If there’s a place that has 1,500 residents, and we have 14 cases, 10 cases,15 cases, that’s community transmission, in several families and we take the measure of quarantining the place. Why? Because it’s not enough to isolate people and their direct contacts,” he told Digi24 late Thursday.
“If there’s community transmission it probably means there are a lot of asymptomatic people which we don’t know about who are spreading” the virus.
He warned that “nobody and no country…. Could exclude more drastic measures,” depending on where the pandemic goes.
“Maybe you don’t lock down a whole country, but you do it in a county, in an area where there is a major transmission” of the virus, Arafat said.
“We haven’t reached this scenario, but we can get there in a month or two, during the autumn and in spring next year we will find ourselves in some tough scenarios if the disease behaves in a way where we can’t control it.”
Romania reported 1,345 new Covid-19 cases on Thursday and 45 deaths in the same day.
Arafat explained that authorities were focusing on prevention efforts. “That’s the point of quarantining a place when we see there is serious community spread of the virus,” he told Digi24.
