ATHENS – A drop in all figures related to the pandemic has been recorded in the last few days in Greece, Health Minister Thanos Plevris said on Friday.

“We can now say that the National Health System is not under pressure any more, as the number of discharges is higher than the number of admissions,” he said in an interview with SKAI radio.

He noted that by March 15, all hospitals will be operating as they did before the latest surge in the pandemic and “we are already starting to send fewer cases to the private sector”.

Plevris said that the Delta variant has now fully subsided but also warned against sending the wrong message. “We have a variant that is milder than Delta in its characteristics but it is not like flu, or a cold,” he said, noting that Omicron was still dangerous for older, unvaccinated people.

The minister predicted that this summer will be very close to normality for fully vaccinated citizens, “provided the course we see in the mathematic models continues, because we now have significant vaccination coverage. We have 84 percent coverage of adults and many people have been infected, so we are seeing a downward trend”.

Finally, he said that the pandemic comes in waves and that it now appears to be declining. “Our life will be very close to normality and this is very important also for tourism,” he added.