We Have No Casualties from Coronavirus and Hope We Won't: Prime Minister

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan believes that the uncertainties caused by the coronavirus will open new opportunities for the country. He stated this during an interview with Shant TV on March 18.

“Therefore, we should look at all this not as a tragedy; thank God, we have no casualties from the coronavirus, and we hope we won’t have any. We should view all this not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity to strengthen Armenia’s economic, political, and all other positions in the world, to build a new level of prosperity in the country. I hope this doesn’t sound cynical, but I hope that the economic revolution we talked about, we now see this as a starting point, as a signal that the time for the economic revolution has indeed come,” he added.

According to Pashinyan, there is also uncertainty in the global economy at this time. “If we look at the global economy, the biggest problem is uncertainty about what will happen in 5 months or 6 months, not only in terms of health but also economically, because now the world’s stock exchanges are at a standstill, as no one knows how this will impact people's economic and consumption behavior. We can now say that the world we lived in January will no longer exist; the world will be completely different, but there is greater uncertainty about what consumer behavior will be like,” he said, noting that a decrease of about 2 trillion dollars will occur.

It is noteworthy that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Armenia has reached 102, with 75 percent of the cases linked to the events in Echmiadzin and a factory.