Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 28 – According to a
letter posted by political analyst Marat Bashirov, “approximately one million”
cars left Moscow as the coronavirus infection spikes in the Russian capital and
just before the days immediately preceding the imposition of restrictions
intended to fight it.
That figure is likely exaggerated,
but even if the actual one was only half of that, this would mean that more
than a million Muscovites have left their homes because of fears of the
coronavirus or of concerns about the limitations on their lives they expected
to be imposed as a result (censoru.net/2020/03/28/iz-moskvy-za-sutki-vyehalo-okolo-milliona-avto-naselenie-panikuet-i-gotovitsja-k-hudshemu.html).
The letter Bashirov posts suggests that
in some nearby Russian cities the hotels are full and many of the Muscovites –
identifiable by their license places – are being taken in as paying guests by
local people. The towns the writer
mentioned did not have coronavirus cases before this wave arrived, but it is
entirely possible that they do now.
In reporting this story, the Censoru
portal says, that “Russians are making the very same mistake that Italians did
at the start of the pandemic. As soon as the coronavirus spread through the major
cities of Italy, residents immediately fled from these centers of infection”
and by so doing spread it to smaller cities and rural areas.
It adds that “a pandemic spreads
very rapidly. A difficult situation with regard too th e coronavirus is already
observed in Moscow Oblast and St. Petersburg.” There are cases in more than
three-quarters of the federal subjects of the Russian Federation, including
occupied Crimea and Stavropol.
Russians are also experiencing
another problem that other countries face: price-gouging by producers and
sellers of goods in short supply be they things like masks directly related to
the disease or those less so such as alcohol (vedomosti.ru/business/articles/2020/03/28/826472-rossiiskie-postavschiki-alkogolya).
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