As of Monday, the Hungarian government has lifted nearly all of its Wuhan coronavirus restrictions, with mask mandates now limited to only hospitals and retirement homes.
The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ended mask mandates for indoor public spaces and on public transport on Monday and has also scrapped capacity limits on events that previously required proof of vaccination or a negative test for the coronavirus.
While masks are now no longer mandatory in most areas, they will still be required for those visiting Hungarian hospitals or care homes, Kronen Zeitung reports.
The Hungarian government had previously ended health passport restrictions last summer for indoor dining and other events but had limited events with more than 500 people to those who could present proof of being fully vaccinated or show a negative test for the virus.
According to the newspaper, 63 per cent of Hungarians are believed to be fully vaccinated, and the country has seen a total of 44,436 deaths throughout the entire pandemic according to statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
During the early days of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020, many western European politicians slammed Hungary for announcing a state of emergency to deal with the pandemic.
“Critics have claimed that the Orbán government was exploiting the coronavirus crisis to impose a dictatorship where parliament was suspended and the Prime Minister would rule by decree indefinitely,” a Hungarian government spokesman told Breitbart London in May of 2020.
Just a month later in June, Prime Minister Orbán and the Hungarian parliament lifted the state of emergency and announced it had gone through the first wave of the pandemic. Despite seeing more pandemic waves, the government did not reinstate the state of emergency.
Other countries, such as Italy, meanwhile are still in long-term states of emergency relating to the pandemic. Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi announced just two weeks ago that Italy would not be extending the country’s state of emergency at the end of March. The state of emergency was originally enacted in January of 2020.