Poland sees 'light at end of tunnel' as cases expected to fall

WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland's new daily coronavirus cases will likely fall in the coming days and the country seems to have passed the worst in its hospitals too, its health minister said on Friday.

The country of 38 million, the largest in the European Union's eastern wing, reported a high of around 35,000 cases a day at the start of April.

It has also reported new record highs in coronavirus-related deaths with the health service being stretched to its limits by a third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Poland reported 17,847 new coronavirus cases on Friday compared to 28,487 a week ago and 21,130 on Thursday.

"The trend seems absolutely downward... Also in hospitals we seem to have passed the peak," Health Minister Adam Niedzielski told public radio.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki added on Friday that Poland could achieve herd immunity by the end of the second quarter thanks to a speeded-up vaccine roll-out.

But a spokesman for the Health Ministry warned that there was no space to loosen restrictions and the situation remained very dire.

"We see the light at the end of the tunnel that could suggest that we are slowly exiting the pandemic's third wave, but we have to maintain our discipline," spokesman Wojciech Andrusiewicz told a news conference on Friday.

Doctors have complained that they do not have enough staff as the third wave has piled pressure on intensive care units in recent weeks.

"The country was unprepared for this scale of an epidemic... There are no beds, no personnel, simply no reserves," said professor Krzysztof Simon, a regional epidemiology consultant from Lower Silesia.

(Reporting by Agnieszka Barteczko, Joanna Plucinska and Pawel Florkiewicz; editing by Jason Neely and Giles Elgood)