WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland reported a record high 548 new coronavirus-related deaths on Saturday, the health ministry said, taking the country’s total above 10,000.
Poland reported 25,571 new cases, lower than a record 27,875 recorded on Nov. 7.
The health ministry said that as of Saturday, COVID-19 patients occupied 22,320 hospital beds and were using 2,126 ventilators, out of 35,182 and 2,805 available, respectively.
The new record comes two days after the Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said there was no need for a national quarantine.
Morawiecki on Thursday said the number of cases earlier this week had started to fall for the first time in two months.
“We do not have to introduce a national quarantine,” the prime minister said on Facebook.
Poland has launched a number of restrictions to curb the spread of the pandemic.
It launched remote teaching for all schools, closed restaurants and most shops in shopping malls and banned gatherings of more than five persons.
The government had considered a national quarantine if the number of cases continued to grow.
The country of 38 million has reported a total of 691,118 coronavirus cases and 10,045 deaths.
Its healthcare system has been increasingly strained by the demand for hospital beds, equipment and medics.
(Reporting by Agnieszka Barteczko and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; editing by Jason Neely)
