To follow the Euro matches, stay at home!
This is clearly the recommendation that Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, gave to its inhabitants on Friday.
In the Russian capital, the Delta variant (also called "Indian") gallops.
More aggressive than the mutant Alpha, its English cousin, it now represents 90% of new cases.
For now, in the neighboring city of Saint Petersburg, which hosts seven Euro matches, no closed fan-zones, nor gatherings of more than 1,000 people, banned as in Moscow, but two new temporary hospitals open ...
It is not only in Russia and its Finnish neighbor that the Delta variant is winning.
In the United Kingdom, where we have been vaccinated massively, unlike the Russian population, it is folded.
Now representing nearly 95% of the cases detected, this new version of Covid-19 has put the country back under tension, forcing Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, to postpone for four weeks, to July 19, the last stage of deconfinement.
Outbreak in UK
And the latest news is hardly encouraging.
English health authorities are now talking about the arrival of a third wave of serious cases of Covid-19 in hospitals.
"The peak should be August 1, but that is likely to change as we get more information," predicts the NHS, the equivalent of our Directorate-General for Health, in a leaked internal email , while the government decided this weekend to make compulsory the vaccination of staff in nursing homes, under penalty of dismissal.
Read also Covid-19: Macron and Merkel warn of the dangerousness of the Delta variant
London now records nearly 11,000 daily cases, a record since February. French epidemiologists are following the evolution of the British situation with all the more attention as it gives valuable indications on what could happen in our country in the coming weeks. In Portugal, where contaminations are on the rise again as the tourist season begins, we are already trying to contain the Delta variant. Since this weekend, the inhabitants of Lisbon have been banned from entering and leaving the capital, except imperative, to prevent it from spreading.
"We must take this very seriously from now on", has also just alerted, the great German virologist Christian Drosten, known to have the ear of Chancellor Angela Merkel. For the co-discoverer of the SARS virus DNA in 2003, Germany has in turn entered "the race" for this variant, the proportion of which has almost doubled in one week across the Rhine. It already represents 15% of new sequenced cases. “It reminds me of the start of the B.1.1.7
(Editor's note: the English variant)
epidemic
in Germany,” notes the scientist.