Acting Health Minister, Prime Minister Florin Citu ordered today the repeal of Health Minister's Order No. 506/2021 setting out new rules for instructing a lockdown.
The order of the acting Health Minister was published on Wednesday evening in the Official Journal, agerpres.ro confirms.
The Minister's Order No. 506/2021, amending and supplementing the Health Minister's Order No. 1.309/2020 on the application of measures to prevent and contain SARS-CoV-2 illness was published in the Official Journal on Tuesday.
The repealed order said that a local lockdown can be ordered for towns or cities/metropolitan areas with over 100,000 inhabitants that score at least 60 points awarded according to a series of indicators such as: the number of Covid tests performed in the last seven days, the 14-day cumulative case rate, the 14-day cumulative positivity rate and its trend, the number of outbreaks/total cases in the administrative areas, the occupancy rate of intensive care beds in the county, the occupancy rate of beds intended for COVID-19 patients in the county.
Deputy Prime Minister and USR Chairman Dan Barna said on Tuesday evening that this order, which establishes the criteria to be used in assessing the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection with a view to instating a local lockdown, is necessary given that the previous regulation contained "very vague indicators".
"This order came naturally, without doubt, because the previous regulation that established the criteria for taking these restrictive measures in a locality or another contained only some very vague indicators: the quality of medical care, patient resilience, these were all completely arbitrary criteria which made possible the situation in Timisoara City. You know what happened in Timisoara, where they flip-flopped on the lockdown, where infection numbers were self-styled as lower, despite being high. There was a build-up of emotion there, with a public fight. (...) The changes operated now establish very clear indicators related to the number of tests, the number of ICU cases, the number of deaths, and they also encourage testing," the USR leader said.