Daily Covid-19 updates resume as cases spike

As the number of infections from the novel coronavirus showed a sudden increase in the past few days in Greece, health authorities are resuming their daily public briefings in a bid to alert Greeks to the risks of relaxing safety measures.

“We need to be on alert, we need to be vigilant and we need to understand that the issue of the virus’ evolution has everything to with each of us individually,” Deputy Minister for Civil Protection Nikos Hardalias told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency on Monday.

“The virus is on the wane, but this does not mean that it has gone away,” he warned, as Greeks flocked to beaches and holiday destinations for the three-day Holy Spirit weekend.

Commenting on the decision of the National Organization for Public Health (EODY) to resume daily briefings – which were briefly replaced by a weekly bulletin at the start of the month as Greece was showing a low rate of new infections – Hardalias suggested that I was aimed to covey a sense of heightened vigilance to the public.

“If every citizen abides by the safety precautions, it will be much easier to prevent clusters and viral loads,” he said.