Amid concerns over the new coronavirus, Belarus has run up against an enviable problem – the overproduction of protective face masks, President Alexander Lukashenko has said.
“We had guided our light industry to urgently reorient enterprises and sew millions of masks. Now they’ve sewn them and have nowhere to put them,” Lukashenko said, speaking in a televised cabinet address on Monday.
“Our light industry is asking to get paid and the health ministry says we don’t need so many masks…I said that we need to turn them around – that there aren’t enough masks in Germany, that we should sell them if the demand is there,” Lukashenko added.
Bellegprom, a major state-owned Belarusian concern whose production includes textiles, weaving, fabric-making, footwear and other goods, temporarily reassigned a number of its factories to produce medical protective marks, with production ramped up to 550,000 masks per day. The decision helped to eliminate shortages of masks in the country’s pharmacies and to eradicate the black market for the masks which was formed online.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that countries around the world were facing shortages of protective facemasks as China, the major global manufacturer of the items, had halted production. The production halt prompted major countries including Germany, South Korea and Russia to halt exports of the facemasks.
On Monday, Russia announced the temporary closure of the border with Belarus for personal travel over the new coronavirus.
Speaking Monday, Lukashenko suggested that the world “has gone mad from the coronavirus,” in part due to the way the media has covered it. He added that his biggest concern was the economy, not the virus itself.
According to the latest statistics, Belarus has a total of 36 cases of COVID-19, 33 of them active. Russia, for its part, has 90 cases, 82 of them active. Neither country has reported any fatalities.
