‘Catastrophically short of doctors’: Virus wallops Ukraine

Early in the pandemic, Ukraine’s ailing health care system struggled with the outbreak, and authorities introduced a tight lockdown in March to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed. The number of cases slowed during the summer but began to rise again quickly, prompting the government at the end of August to close Ukraine’s borders for a month. Despite that, the number of positive tests in the country reached a new peak of 4,661 a day in the first weekend of October. Overall, confirmed COVID-19 infections in the country have nearly doubled in the past month, topping 234,000, and experts say all reported numbers in all countries understate the true toll of the virus.