Russia resumed normal life on Monday, November 8 after a national non-working week decreed by the authorities to stop the spread of the coronavirus, as the country continues to record tens of thousands of new contagions and more than a thousand deaths every day.
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President Vladimir Putin has decreed a non-working period from October 30 to November 7 to break the chains of contamination in the country, the most bereaved in Europe.
In Moscow, the capital, as in most Russian cities, this measure included the closure of cafes and restaurants, sports centers, beauty salons and stores of non-essential products.
Contamination record
The majority of Russian regions have decided not to extend these measures and only a few, including that of Novgorod (North-West) or Tomsk (Siberia), have opted for an extension of around one week. Russia, however, recorded a new record of daily contamination on Saturday, with 41,335 new cases of coronavirus identified in 24 hours. A new record of daily deaths due to Covid - 1,195 - was established on Thursday, during the non-working period. On Monday, Russian authorities announced that they had officially identified 39,400 new cases in the last 24 hours and 1,190 deaths.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was "
very early
" on Monday to draw conclusions on the effect of the nonworking period.
"
It will only be clear in a week,
" he told reporters.
Since the beginning of the autumn, the country has already broken records for daily contaminations and deaths due to Covid-19 several times, in the midst of the epidemic outbreak.
After strict containment in spring 2020, the authorities refused to reconfine, despite new waves of epidemics, in order to limit the economic losses.
Read alsoRussia faces its worst wave of Covid
The rapid spread of Covid-19 is also facilitated by the low vaccination rate of the Russian population, against a background of widespread mistrust of local sera.
Even though Russia has several vaccines of its own design, only 34% of the estimated 144 million Russians are fully immunized, according to official statistics.
In total, Russia has officially recorded 8,834,495 cases of coronavirus and 248,004 deaths to date.
According to the statistics agency Rosstat, which has a broader definition of deaths linked to the virus, the total toll of the pandemic in Russia, however, stood at nearly 450,000 deaths at the end of September.
