ATHENS – Just entering a third year, there are signs that Greece’s vaccination program has paid off, with cases, hospitaizations and deaths from COVID-19 gradually receding.

That’s despite the Coronavirus lingering and having been spread by rabid anti-vaxxers who said vaccines didn’t work, weren’t safe and were part of an international conspiracy to alter their DNA and control their minds.

The New Democracy government’s advisory panel of doctors and scienteists is encouraged with the numbers, said Kathimerini, although deaths still hover around 60 a day, almost all elderly, unvaccinated and with multiple or underlying conditions.

With a requirement that masks no longer have to be worn outdoors – although still advised in major public gathering spots – the news could lead to other health restrictions being eased, the paper said.

A key indicator is the falling number of patients in public hospital Intensive Care Units (ICUs) on ventilators which decreased 30.7 percent in February, falling from 570 to just under 400 in daily counts.

The number of fatalities of patients with COVID-19 went down 43.5 percent in the same period and there were about 1,000 fewer hospitalizations, the results of the vaccination scheme that had stalled late in 2021.

Still, it passed the benchmark of 70 percent of the population of 10.7 million people needed to be inoculated to slow the pandemic, with health authorities saying 93.3 percent of those with two shots getting a third booster shot.