Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, which hosts Euro 2020 matches, on Saturday recorded the highest daily death toll from the coronavirus in the country since the start of the pandemic.
According to official figures, the former imperial capital has recorded 107 deaths in the past 24 hours, a figure which Russian news agencies say is the highest of any city in the country since the virus first emerged.
A popular city for tourists, Saint-Petersburg hosts a total of seven Euro football matches. There is still one game to go in the city, a quarter-final next Friday, potentially with France if they beat Switzerland on Monday.
Russia as a whole recorded 21,665 new infections on Saturday, a record since January, as the country is hit hard by the Delta variant. Apart from Saint Petersburg, the capital, Moscow, and its region have also been severely affected in recent weeks.
The daily death toll nationwide on Saturday was the highest since December with 619 dead, for a total of 132,683 since the start of the pandemic, according to the official tally. The statistics agency Rosstat, which has a broader definition of deaths linked to Covid, counts some 270,000 deaths between the start of the pandemic and the end of April 2021.
“To stop the pandemic, one thing is necessary: massive and rapid vaccinations. No one has invented any other solution, ”the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, hammered on television on Saturday.
“To fundamentally solve this problem, you have to get vaccinated or resolve to confinement,” he added.
Moscow has reintroduced in recent weeks restrictive measures such as the return of compulsory teleworking for some employees, compulsory vaccination of employees in the service sector or the creation of a health pass to go to restaurants.
General containment, as in spring 2020, is however not envisaged for the moment.
The vaccination campaign has lagged behind in Russia since December amid widespread public mistrust, despite repeated calls from President Vladimir Putin.
Only 21.2 million people out of 146 million inhabitants have received at least one dose, according to Friday figures released by the Gogov site, which aggregates data from regions and media for lack of official national statistics.
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