BNS newsletter: key long weekend news

VILNIUS – BNS provides a review of key news from the long weekend in Lithuania:

MOVEMENT CONTROL. The government on Sunday extended the inter-municipal movement control until January 31. The extension comes with a condition to review it in two weeks time on January 17, taking into account the latest infection case and death data in the country.

"The existing figures show that withdrawal would be criminal in some sense as the responsibility is huge and the figures are growing, the situation is definitely not improving enough for us to say that everything has been done," Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite told a Cabinet sitting.

THE CORONAVIRUS SITUATION:

* 6,054 new coronavirus cases have been confirmed over the past long weekend, and 94 people have died. That brings the total death toll from the coronavirus in the country to 1,643. As of Sunday, 2,500 coronavirus patients are being treated in hospitals, including 185 ICU cases. Lithuanian now has almost 67,000 active cases.

* Robertas Petraitis, director of the National Public Health Center, says the number of unaccounted deaths from he coronavirus now stands at 1,171, several hundred more than it was reported before. In his words, the discrepancies are due to the fact that information from medical establishments comes late. There were some 804 unaccounted deaths before.

* Some 7,600 drivers have been told to turn around at checkpoints over the past long weekend as they tried to enter other municipalities. Since the middle of December, when the inter-municipal movement ban was introduced, officers have told more than 33,000 vehicles to turn around. Moreover, 498 people have been fined over the last weekend for their failure to stick to the existing quarantine rules.

* The Council of Health Experts on Saturday proposed to the government to ensure early COVID-19 testing and isolation of infected people. They are proposing changing the testing order and using rapid antigen tests for people with symptoms, and also train non-medical workers to independently take swabs. Also, there's a proposal to test more people preventively.

LANDSLIDE IN NORWAY. Rescuers in Norway have recovered five bodies and are still looking for five other people, including two children, after a landslide destroyed several houses in a village. A Lithuanian citizen Rasa Lasinskiene, 49, is among the missing people.