The head of this highly closed country in Central Asia said on Tuesday in a rare interview with foreign media that Turkmenistan has not recorded any cases of coronavirus since the beginning of the epidemic.
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“Thanks to the work we have done,” Turkmenistan “has not yet discovered any case of this disease,” said Gurbanguly Berdyukhmedov in an interview with an international television channel based in Moscow called Mir.
Turkmenistan is one of the few countries in the world, besides North Korea, that has not reported any cases of COVID-19 on its soil. The other countries in this case are essentially an isolated archipelago in the Pacific Ocean.
However, it was only in April that the country began to ease its measures to combat the Coronavirus, with restaurants and mosques reopening. If trains can operate again, air travel remains suspended.
Gurbanguly Berdy Mammadov told the TV channel that his country has two Russian vaccines, EpiVacCorona and Sputnik V.
Turkmen observers and the media abroad have questioned the claim that Turkmenistan has not recorded any cases of coronavirus.
According to them, a Turkish diplomat based in Ashgabat died last year due to illness, and the British ambassador admitted on social media in December that he had contracted the virus in Turkmenistan.
With the outbreak of the epidemic in the spring of 2020, Turkmenistan was one of the last countries to allow spectators to enter stadiums. Wearing a mask has always been discouraged.
The authorities ’position changed after a visit by the World Health Organization in July, which expressed concern about the high number of“ acute respiratory diseases or pneumonia ”and recommended that the authorities take action. “As if Covid-19 was spreading.”
