YEREVAN, OCTOBER 28, ARMENPRESS. Amid rising COVID-19 infection rates the government is considering reinstating the outdoor mask mandate, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at the Cabinet meeting.

He said that the government believes that lockdowns should be avoided and that they must work in two directions. “First, heightened mask mandates, and I don’t rule out that we’ll make new decisions here,” the prime minister said, adding that they consider re-instituting the outdoor mask mandate.

However, the most important approach, in the PM’s words, is the vaccination process. “Our government succeeded, including through the support of international partners and thanks to major donations, to have the necessary doses of vaccines for vaccinating all Armenian citizens. And our strategy must be to go in the direction of vaccinations.”

The Prime Minister, his spouse and their adult son and daughter have been vaccinated, with the exception of two children. The PM revealed that when their 14-year-old daughter got infected with COVID-19, none of their other vaccinated family members got infected. “We saw the effectiveness of the vaccine on our own concrete example,” he said.

He further noted that there are cases of abuse in the vaccination campaign. “I am saying this with regret, we have more than a dozen of health workers who are involved as defendants in criminal cases. We have detained persons, if I am not mistaken six persons, and cases of issuing fake vaccination certificates. The most regrettable thing is that we are working hard to acquire the vaccines but we have cases when they give the paper, waste the vaccine by simply opening the vial and emptying it,” he said

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan