The host of Euro 2020 in Russia, St. Petersburg, reported on Saturday the highest daily toll in the country for COVID-19 in a city since the start of the pandemic, according to the data.
Official figures said the city, which has already hosted six Euro 2020 matches and will take place on Friday a quarter-final, recorded 107 virus deaths in the past 24 hours.
Russian news agencies said this was the highest value of any Russian city since the beginning of the pandemic.
St. Petersburg was where dozens of Finnish fans caught the coronavirus after traveling to the city for the defeat of his team against Belgium.
Russia has seen an explosion of new coronavirus cases since mid-June, driven by the highly infectious Delta variant first identified in India.
The country as a whole reported 21,665 new infections on Saturday, the highest daily figure since January.
The dramatic rise in infections comes as Moscow officials are pushing skeptical Russians against the vaccine to be inoculated, having lifted most antivirus restrictions late last year.
“To stop the pandemic, one thing is needed: rapid, large-scale vaccinations. No one has invented any other solution,” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin told state television on Saturday.
“To fundamentally solve this problem, you need to get vaccinated or go to a closure,” he was quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency as saying.
Russia also reported 619 new coronavirus deaths on Saturday, the highest daily number since December, which added 132,683 deaths since the pandemic began.
But officials in the world’s sixth most affected country – and the toughest in Europe – have been accused of downplaying the severity of the outbreak in the country.
According to a broader definition of coronavirus-related deaths, statistics agency Rosstat in late April said Russia has recorded at least 270,000 deaths since pandemic it began.
Only 21.2 million of a population of about 146 million had received at least one dose of vaccine as of Friday, according to the Gogov website, which calculates COVID figures from the regions and the media.
© 2021 AFP
Citation: Russia host in St. Petersburg records record number of COVID tolls (2021, June 26) recovered on June 26, 2021 at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-russia-euro-host -saint-petersburg.html
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