Moscow faces a more aggressive and contagious variant of the coronavirus. This was declared on Thursday, June 17, 2021, the mayor of the Russian capital, where the health situation is deteriorating rapidly since Moscow has been facing an upsurge in the number of Covid-19 cases for several days.
The situation is deteriorating in the Russian capital
This Thursday, June 17, 2021, the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, declared that the health situation relating to the Covid-19 epidemic was deteriorating in the Russian capital. Indeed, for several months, the daily number of new cases in the metropolis did not exceed the bar of 3,000 cases. But last Sunday, there were 7,704 new cases of contamination in Moscow, the largest peak since December 24. According to Sergei Sobyanin, the threshold of 9,000 new infections could even be crossed this Friday, June 18. This would represent a record for the capital since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic.
A new, more aggressive strain of the virus
According to statements reported by the RIA news agency, the mayor of Moscow also announced the occurrence of a new variant in the Russian capital: “ A new mutation has arrived, a new strain is active. It is more aggressive, it is harder to cure it, it spreads faster “. However, the latter has not yet specified which type of variant is concerned by the situation. If for the time being, he has not announced any new health restrictions, he nevertheless declared, during a government meeting broadcast on television, to have planned that the city quickly made available an increased number of beds. hospital in view of a possible influx of patients.
At the same time, Sergei Sobyanin decreed last Wednesday that vaccination would now be compulsory for all employees in the service sector. In view of this announcement, some 60% of them (or around two million people) will need to be vaccinated by August 15. For information and according to the census of the Gogov site (which aggregates data from regions and media for lack of official national statistics), only 19 million Russians out of 146 million inhabitants have received at least one dose of vaccine since last December. . In total, in Moscow, 1.8 million people have received at least one injection out of the 12 or 13 million inhabitants that the city has officially counted.