Five Percent of Russians have Been Infected with Covid Since Start of Pandemic, Officials Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 5 – Russian officials today reported registering 18,645 new cases of infection, pushing the total number of infected over seven million or approximately five percent of the Russian population. The officials also reported registering 793 new deaths from the coronavirus over the past 24 hours (t.me/COVID2019_official/3514 and regnum.ru/news/3361898.html).

            The pandemic continued to ebb and  flow across the Russian Federation, with the rankings on infections and deaths changing so rapidly that both figures are at least in part a reflection of the rate of registering figures with the authorities rather than of underlying realities (regnum.ru/news/society/3361504.html and rbc.ru/society/05/09/2021/5e2fe9459a79479d102bada6).

            Russian analysts are increasingly concerned about the changes the pandemic has introduced in world trade. By pushing up the costs of transport, the pandemic has hit countries like Russia that export bulk cargoes more than those who export high-end finished products (vz.ru/economy/2021/9/4/1117236.html).

            Many countries have no choice but to continue to import the latter but the push for import substitution will fall primarily on bulk cargoes where the cost of transportation forms a larger share of final price than it does with finished goods. Russia will be one of the chief losers in this situation, and this negative impact of the pandemic is likely to cast a shadow for a long time.

            As far as the domestic Russian economy is concerned, ever more businesses say they won’t dismiss workers who refuse to get vaccinated even though they are being encouraged to do that by some officials (govoritmagadan.ru/predpriyatiya-kolymy-s-nizkim-urovnem-vakcinirovannyh-zakryvat-ne-budut/).

            Such policies may keep the economy from declining even more sharply than many predict but only at the cost that the coronavirus is likely to spread throughout workplaces and to the homes of employees, pushing back the date at which the pandemic will end in the Russian Federation.