Russia, The country with the most deaths in Europe from Covid-19, you only have two weeks to prepare for the avalanche of infections that ómicron has caused in other places, its president warned on Wednesday Vladimir Putin.
“We see what is happening in the world and this shows us that we have about two weeks to prepare,” Putin said, calling for faster screening and vaccination.
While the World Health Organization (WHO) warns that in just two months half of Europeans may have been infected by omicron, Russia is just recovering from a particularly deadly wave caused by the delta variant.
Even so, the authorities are unable to convince the population to become immunized against the virus.
“With all evidence, (the vaccine) Sputnik-V it is effective enough. Maybe even more than the other vaccines used in the world,” the Russian leader said during a government meeting broadcast on television.
Russia recorded more than 87,000 deaths linked to Covid-19 in November, according to a tally by the national statistics agency Rosstat. It is a monthly record that brought the total deaths from the pandemic to more than 600,000 at the end of November.
The government balance, which more restrictively defines the victims of the coronavirus, evoked 318,432 deaths this Wednesday.
Although Russia has multiple vaccines created at the national level, less than half of its 144 million inhabitants have the complete immunization schedule, according to the Gogov website dedicated to the epidemic.
After a strict lockdown in the spring of 2020, the authorities have refused to impose this measure again to limit the economic damage.
The pandemic, however, appears to have exacerbated the country’s demographic decline.
According to Rosstat, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births by 954,000 during the first eleven months of 2021. In the same period of the previous year, this difference was almost 575,000.
