Lifting of coronavirus restrictions? Health minister comments

Poland's Health Minister Adam Niedzielski was asked on Thursday in TVN24's "Rozmowa Piaseckiego" about potential lifting of coronavirus restrictions. He said that for the time being the duty to wear masks in closed spaces would remain in place. "I think that in March we will have make a decision to simply lift those restrictions which aren't being anyway followed at the moment, except for masks," he added.

"I think that once we already see that this number oscillates around and drops below 10,000 (COVID cases daily), I will certainly recommend such move to the prime minister," Niedzielski said.

The minister also stressed that he "absolutely stands by his hypothesis" from the previous week, when he had said Poland was dealing with "the beginning of the end of the pandemic". "This hypothesis is fundamentally based on what we already know about Omicron and how it differs from the previous variants," the minister explained.

He admitted, however, that "everything is possible" and "it's not that hypotheses are definitive statements". "The most likely scenario is the scenario that if further waves emerge - and we must assume that another one will appear in the fall - they will not be so acute from the point of view of the health care system," TVN24 guest said.

Niedzielski was also asked about draft laws related to COVID - the so-called lex Hoc (named after its main proponent, PiS lawmaker Czesław Hoc) which in the end was never voted on, and the so-called lex Kaczyński which the lower house had rejected. "We tried to solve this problem in different ways. The consecutive versions that were presented were less controversial. But reality at the end of this process showed that even the relatively the least controversial solution was not accepted as well," he said. He added that the least controversial solution was lex Kaczyński.

The minister also said that the previous idea, lex Hoc, which would grant employers a possibility to check if employees are vaccinated, had been impossible to implement due to political reasons. Asked if he had considered resigning from office, after publically endorsing the said project and its provisions, Niedzielski replied: "Of course I thought about it, there even was a public debate on this issue".

"When the number of (daily) infections was reaching 60,000 and we were asking ourselves how it would affect the hospitals, my sense of responsibility did not allow me to take offesne at the reality, I had to continue my work, my mission," he underscored.