ATHENS – Even record numbers of cases, deaths, hospitalizations and patients on ventilators in public hospital Intensive Care Units (ICUs) as the COVID-19 pandemic rises in Greece won’t see general lockdowns being brought.

That word came from the New Democracy government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis who said he’s focused almost solely on accelerating an economic recovery that would be hurt by again closing non-essential businesses.

His government also said that would punish people who are vaccinated and he instead has concentrated on measures restricting the unvaccinated from public gathering spots to push them to be inoculated.

Government spokesman Yiannis Oikonomou told SKAI TV that’s the government’s strategy and that, “We will not deviate from it,” and Mitsotakis also pulled back from a pledge to consider mandatory vacations if the pandemic worsened, as it has.

“The market will stand, society will stand, children at schools, students at universities. I don’t think anyone wants to go back to a regime where we texted to go out for two hours. No one in education wants to go back to a computer at home,” said Oikonomou, stressing that the government will persist with “this philosophy of measures aimed primarily at the unvaccinated,” which has largely failed.

The unvaccinated are required to show negative COVID-tests, as their own cost of 10 euros ($11.45) if they want to go into restaurants, stores and other places apart from supermarkets, pharmacies and churches, which are exempt.
“The general direction is: We do not close again, we apply the sanitary measures, there is an extensive system of controls that is applied much more strictly, all this in order to remain open and not to take steps back,” he added.

Greece remains among the ten EU countries where the pandemic is still a “very high concern,” the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said.

The center added that, “The overall epidemiological situation in the EU/EEA was characterized by a high and rapidly increasing overall case notification rate and a low but slowly increasing death rate.”
“Case notification rates, death rates, and hospital and ICU admissions are all forecast to increase over the next two weeks,” it continued.