Doctors in Hungary question reopening amid spike in deaths

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Doctors in Hungary are questioning the government's decision to lift some lockdown restrictions amid peaking COVID-19 infections and deaths, saying that could lead to an even more dire situation in the Central European nation.

Shops and services were allowed to reopen Wednesday after 2.5 million people received a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, a benchmark the government set for when a gradual reopening could take place. Hungarian officials say the number of administered vaccines, rather than trends in infections and deaths, will determine the country's strategy for lifting its lockdown.

“Closures can only limit the spread of the virus. The government ... decided weeks ago that any reopening measures would depend on the number of vaccinations," Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, told reporters on Thursday.

Additional restrictions could be lifted within a week, he added, saying that more than 4 million in Hungary could receive a first vaccine dose by the end of the month.

Yet some in Hungary’s medical community have criticized the reopening as premature and based on arbitrary criteria when new infections and virus deaths are soaring.

“They shouldn’t measure the severity of the situation with (vaccination) numbers but with how overwhelmed the hospitals and intensive care wards are,” Dr. Zsombor Kunetz told The Associated Press. “The government has now come up with its own metric that is not in line with the severity of the pandemic at the moment.”

Hungary has had the worst death rate per 1 million inhabitants in the world in recent weeks, according to Johns Hopkins University, and has seen 22,681 deaths in the pandemic.

The lifting of restrictions on Wednesday — which included extending...