The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin. – KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP
The mayor of Moscow announced on Wednesday an obligation of vaccination against Covid-19 for all employees in the service sector in order to counter a “dramatic” epidemiological development of the situation. “We must simply do everything to conduct mass vaccination as quickly as possible and stop this terrible disease and put an end to the deaths of thousands of people,” Sergei Sobyanin said on his website.
Faced with a surge in the number of cases, he had already declared the entire week of June 15 non-working in order to fight against the deterioration of the situation. Currently, 12,000 people are hospitalized in Moscow due to the new coronavirus. “Morbidity is at the level of the peaks of the end of 2020”, noted the mayor, in reference to the second deadly wave of the epidemic in Russia. This announcement of an obligation to vaccinate against Covid-19 is a first in Russia, and goes against the statements of President Vladimir Putin who, while calling on the Russians to be vaccinated, said he was opposed to any compulsory measure.
Less than 13% of Russians have received a dose of the vaccine
The excitement of the situation in Moscow, where 12 to 13 million people officially live, has led Sergei Sobyanin to impose vaccination. According to him, only 1.8 million residents of the capital are vaccinated. Russia said Wednesday it had counted 13,397 new cases in the past 24 hours and 396 deaths. Moscow has counted 5,782 and 75 respectively. Although available since the end of 2020, the Russian vaccine Sputnik-V is shunned by the Russians, wary of this product developed by the authorities.
To date and since December, barely 19 million Russians, or less than 13% of the population, have received at least one dose, according to the census carried out by the Gogov site, which aggregates data from regions and media for lack of statistics. national official. According to a poll carried out in April by the independent Levada institute, more than 60% of Russians questioned do not intend to be vaccinated, despite contamination figures which have not fallen for several weeks.
Almost no more restrictions
Russia is one of the countries most affected by the pandemic. According to the statistics agency Rosstat, more than 270,000 deaths were linked to him at the end of April, more than double the toll of 127,576 deaths recognized to date by the government in its daily accounts. Demographic data also show a very sharp increase in mortality in January-April 2021 compared to the same period of 2020, with 752,000 deaths recorded against around 611,000 a year earlier.
In 2020, the growth in the number of deaths had already reached 18% with 2.1 million deaths against 1.8 million in 2019. The authorities have not detailed the causes of this surge in mortality than the statistics concerning the Covid explain only partially. After the spring 2020 containment, Russia, to preserve its economy, implemented very limited anti-Covid restrictions, most of which were lifted in early 2021.