NUR-SULTAN (Reuters) – Pneumonia cases in the Kazakh capital, Nur-Sultan, have surged amid the novel coronavirus outbreak, its healthcare chief said on Thursday as the country widened renewed lockdowns to curb the spread of the disease.
Pneumonia can be caused by the coronavirus and the surging numbers could indicate that many cases of the novel coronavirus are going untested. The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the former Soviet republic has nearly tripled this month, to 32,000.
Doctors are finding some 600 people a day with pneumonia symptoms, Saule Kisikova, the Nur-Sultan healthcare department chief, told a briefing, up from about 80 a day before the coronavirus outbreak.
“Every day, 350 to 400 patients are hospitalised in the city with either COVID-19 or pneumonia,” she said, and the number of daily confirmed COVID-19 cases averaged 150. “Within a week, the number of patients (in hospitals) has tripled,” she said.
State-run clinics in the city of 1.1 million – the healthcare providers for the majority of the population – have closed their doors to visitors this week as their doctors reinforced COVID-19 call centres and ambulance teams.
Kazakhstan, which ended a nationwide lockdown last month, has now once again locked down several towns and introduced new measures such as closing shopping malls, markets and parks on weekends.
It locked down the oil industry town of Zhanaozen and several nearby villages in the country’s west on Thursday. Labour Minister Birzhan Nurymbetov urged all companies to return to remote work.
(Reporting by Tamara Vaal, writing by Olzhas Auyezov; editing by Robert Birsel, Larry King)
