Late Tuesday, the Lithuanian Public Health Centre reported a breakout of coronavirus at a transport firm in Kaunas, the country’s second largest city.
Eighteen people, mostly workers arriving from Uzbekistan, were confirmed infected. Some 200 people working or connected to the firm, Hegelmann Transporte, will be tested for Covid-19, according to Renata Lingienė from the National Public Health Centre.
The people undergoing tests didn't have close contact with anyone else, which means the number of infections shouldn’t increase “dramatically”, according to Lignienė.
The first person felt the symptoms of the coronavirus on July 3 after arriving in Lithuania the day before. Therefore, it’s likely the person got infected while still in Uzbekistan, according to the public health official.
If everyone working at the firm did adhere to self-isolation rules, they shouldn’t have been infected, said Lignienė. “The epidemiological investigation will show if they got infected in their home country, which is theoretically possible,” she said, adding that it’s more likely they got infected by not self-isolating properly.
Lingienė called on everyone arriving from abroad, even from countries that are not showing high coronavirus case counts, to self-isolate.
“The situation in Europe is getting worse not by the day, but by the hour,” she added.
Seven additional infections confirmed
In addition to the outbreak at the Kaunas company, seven other new coronavirus infections were diagnosed in Lithuania over Tuesday, the National Public Health Centre said on Wednesday.
According to the official statistics, which exclude the cases at Hegelmann Transporte, 1,882 people have been infected with Covid-19 in Lithuania. Only 209 are considered active cases, while 1,582 have recovered and 127 are in isolation.
Seventy-nine people have died of Covid-19 in the country so far, and another 12 coronavirus-infected patients have died of other causes.
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