The Armenian Ministry of Health said on Monday that only ten people tested positive for the coronavirus in the past day, the lowest single-day number of cases recorded by it since the start of the pandemic.
The ministry reported an average of two dozen cases a day last week, sharply down from a record high of 4,500 cases registered on February 2 at the height of an Omicron-driven wave of infections.
The country’s infection rate has steadily declined since then despite the Armenian authorities’ failure to enforce a mandatory health pass for entry to cultural and leisure venues introduced on January 22. Very few restaurants, bars and other private entities have required visitors to produce evidence of their vaccination against COVID-19 or a negative test result.
Not surprisingly, Armenia’s vaccine rollout has slowed further over the last two months. According to the Ministry of Health, only 46,000 people received a second dose of a vaccine in March, compared with over 120,000 such shots administered in January.
Gayane Sahakian, the deputy director of the ministry’s National Center for Disease Control and Prevention, expressed serious concern at this downward trend. Sahakian warned that Armenians should brace themselves for a new wave of infections anticipated by the health authorities.
“We will have a visible increase [in infections] at the end of April,” she said, arguing that first cases of the more contagious BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron have already been detected in Armenia.
As of Monday, just over 967,000 people making up more than a third of the country’s population were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Only 34,300 of them also received booster shots.