Paul Goble
Staunton, April 10 – Media reports that Moscow may suspend flights to Turkey because of rising coronavirus infections in that country have angered Russians for whom Turkey remains a popular tourist destination. They have expressed their anger on various Internet platforms (regnum.ru/news/3239632.html and regnum.ru/news/3239390.html).
Today, Moscow officials reported registering 8704 new cases and 402 new deaths from the coronavirus, as the pandemic continued to ebb and flow across the Russian Federation, down in most places but spiking in several, especially where no vaccine is yet available (t.me/COVID2019_official/2754 and regnum.ru/news/society/3233862.html).
Moscow continued to rush vaccine to St. Petersburg, one of the continuing hotspots, dispatching 38,100 new sets of doses today alone (regnum.ru/news/3239590.html). But one person who presumably can get the vaccine whenever he wants it – Vladimir Putin -- still hasn’t received the required second shot (regnum.ru/news/3239556.html).
Elsewhere on the vaccine front, experts from the European Agency of Medicines arrived in Moscow to investigate the standards Russians have used to test and now produce the vaccine (echo.msk.ru/news/2819528-echo.html).
Meanwhile, in other pandemic-related developments today,
· A new analysis says that excess deaths in Russia over the last 18 months have less to do with covid than with the inadequate quality of that country’s medical care system. The pandemic only highlighted its shortcomings (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2021/04/10/1896549.html).
· The Moscow Patriarchate told believers to refrain from foreign travel to religious shrines as long as the threat of the pandemic remains in place (echo.msk.ru/news/2819738-echo.html).
· And the Higher School of Economics warned that Russians like others must be prepared for a prolonged recession after the pandemic ends. Its experts said that official optimism about the future of the economy was not justified (echo.msk.ru/news/2819670-echo.html).
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