Covid-19: Delta variant is gaining ground in Russia, global lifting of restrictions thwarted

Russia announced new daily death records from Covid-19 in Moscow and St. Petersburg on Monday.

The latter hosts Euro football matches where supporters have been infected.

According to official data, the Russian capital recorded 124 dead and St. Petersburg 110 in 24 hours, breaking the records that the two largest Russian cities had already broken over the weekend.

This increase occurs despite the gradual introduction of health measures, such as the return to compulsory teleworking for some employees and the compulsory vaccination of employees in the service sector.

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According to the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, nearly 2,000 people are hospitalized every day because of Covid-19 in this city of more than 12 million inhabitants and around 75% of the available beds are occupied.

General containment, as in spring 2020, is however not envisaged for the time being in order to preserve the economy.

One of the hardest hit countries

As for St. Petersburg, the quarter-final of Euro football, which will pit Switzerland against Spain, will take place on Friday despite the outbreak caused by the Delta variant, organizers said on Monday.

The decision comes as nearly 300 supporters returning to Finland after attending the Euro in this city have tested positive for Covid-19.

They were there on June 21 for the match between their country and Belgium.

The Russian vaccination campaign has been lagging behind since December, against a background of general public mistrust and despite repeated calls from President Vladimir Putin.

Russia is, with 133,893 deaths recorded by the government, the most bereaved European country and one of the hardest hit in the world.

The Rosstat statistics agency, which has a broader definition of deaths linked to Covid-19, recorded 270,000 deaths at the end of April.

New restrictions in Bangladesh, Australia, South Africa ...

Identified for the first time in India, the more contagious Delta variant is now present in at least 85 countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), raising fears, despite vaccination campaigns, of new waves of the disease. pandemic. It has forced some states to review their strategies. Bangladesh, which recorded 119 dead on Sunday, a daily record, closed almost all of its public transport on Monday, forcing thousands of employees in the capital, Dhaka (20 million inhabitants), to walk at work, before strict confinement on Thursday.

In Australia, new cases attributed to the Delta variant, which appeared following flaws in the quarantine systems for travelers coming from abroad, were recorded on Monday in several cities. Sydney is confined for two weeks, Darwin until Friday and distancing rules have been tightened in other areas. Neighboring Indonesia, the country currently most affected by Covid-19 in Southeast Asia, on Sunday recorded a new daily record of contaminations (more than 2,000 new cases), at a time when hospitals are overwhelmed, causing fear a generalized failure of the health system. South Africa, the most affected country on the African continent and which is suffering the full brunt of a third wave of the pandemic due to the Delta variant, announced on Monday that it had passed the threshold of 60,000 deaths.New restrictions were announced on Sunday.

Conversely Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic with more than 127,472 dead, is continuing its easing momentum.

Masks will no longer be mandatory outdoors, except in crowded places.

The curfew was also lifted on Monday in Valle d'Aosta, the last region where it was still in force.

Protest in Pakistan to be vaccinated

The new British Minister of Health, Sajid Javid, meanwhile maintained the government's objective of lifting on July 19 the last restrictions still in force in England despite the increase in the number of contaminations. Despite this, Hong Kong will ban all flights from the United Kingdom from July 1 in an attempt to curb contamination after discovering several cases of a mutation linked to the Delta variant among travelers arriving from this country.

In Pakistan, hundreds of people have invaded a vaccination center in Islamabad to demand to be vaccinated. They mostly work abroad and said they needed to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is hard to find in this country, to be allowed to travel to the Gulf states. Regarding AstraZeneca, a study published on Monday shows that an interval of several months between the first and the second dose improves protection against Covid-19. This study by the University of Oxford sees it as a “reassuring” element for countries with supply problems.