Orban: Over 900 patients request discharge; legislative vacuum can have extremely negative effects

Prime Minister Ludovic Orban said on Tuesday that more than 900 COVID-19 patients had requested discharge and more than 3,000 people diagnosed with the same illness could not be hospitalised after the Constitutional Court ruled against the law on measures to prevent and combat the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, adding that the two weeks of legislative vacuum could have "extremely negative" effects.

"After the ruling of the Constitutional Court, over 900 patients requested discharge, and over 3,000 diagnosed Romanians were not hospitalised for treatment. We did not have any legal possibility to order isolation at home, their treatment in isolation at home or anywhere else. For all the people who were infected during that time, following epidemiological investigations, we could not order the measure of isolation of the people who had come in contact with the infected people. These two weeks in which there was a legislative vacuum can have extremely negative effects on the spread of the virus. Our obligation is, once the law enters into force, to expeditiously take all the measures we have available from a constitutional and legal point of view to stop the spread of the epidemic," Orban said at the beginning of a government meeting.

He added that, with the entry into force of the quarantine and isolation law, the Executive has "again at its disposal the tools that any government in any democratic country has at its disposal to enable them to fight the pandemic effectively."

"The law regulates specific measures in the event of epidemics, infectious diseases and we have the right to take measures to protect public health - measures of isolation, quarantine, treatment of patients in hospitals or in an organised setting under medical supervision," the prime minister explained.

Head of the Emergency Management Department (DSU) Raed Arafat presented a decision of the National Committee on Emergency Management amending government decision regarding the extension of the state of alert after the entry into force of the quarantine and isolation law.