COVID-19: Record Infections in Moscow Due to a More Aggressive New Variant

While Russia is hosting the European nations soccer tournament, Moscow is facing a more aggressive and contagious variant of the coronavirus. This was reported by the mayor of the Russian capital on Thursday, June 17, 2021, where the health situation is rapidly deteriorating as Moscow has seen a dramatic increase in Covid-19 cases in the last few days.

Coronavirus

The situation in the Russian capital is deteriorating

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that the health situation related to the Covid-19 outbreak in the Russian capital is deteriorating quickly. In fact, the daily number of new cases in the metropolis has not exceeded 3000 for several months. According to Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, the threshold of 9000 new infections could also be exceeded this Friday, June 18. This would represent a record for the capital since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak. As of June the 18th there were 9,056 new Covid-19 cases of contamination in Moscow, the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic.

A new and more aggressive strain of the virus

As reported by the RIA news agency, the mayor of Moscow also announced the appearance of a new variant in the Russian capital: “A new mutation has arrived, a new strain is active. It is more aggressive, it is more difficult to treat, it spreads faster.” This has not yet specified what type of variant is affected by the situation. While he did not announce any new health restrictions, for now, he said during a televised government meeting that the city would quickly provide more hospital beds in light of a possible influx of patients.

At the same time, Sergei Sobyanin ordered on Wednesday that vaccination would henceforth be mandatory for all service sector employees. In view of this announcement, about 60% of them (that is, about two million people) will have to be vaccinated by August 15. For the record, according to a count by the website Gogov (which aggregates data from regions and media in the absence of official national statistics), only 19 million Russians out of a population of 146 million have received at least one dose of vaccine since last December. In Moscow, of the 12 or 13 million residents that the city officially counted, a total of 1.8 million have received at least one shot.