Russia Records COVID-19 Deaths, Euro 2020 Quarter-final City Registers 119 Victims19

Illustration of the atmosphere of the COVID-19 pandemic in Moscow, Russia. (Wikimedia Commons/Mos.ru)

JAKARTA - Russian health authorities reported the highest daily death toll from COVID-19 since the country's pandemic last year, with Moscow and St. Petersburg is the city with the most deaths.

Citing Euronews Tuesday, June 29, Russian health authorities reported 652 deaths in the last 24 hours, the highest ever to beat the record in December 2020 as Russia faced a second wave of COVID-19.

The capital Moscow was the highest with 121 deaths, followed by St Petersburg, the city that will host the Euro 2020 quarter-finals between Switzerland and Spain on Friday at Krestovsky Stadium aka Gazprom Arena, with 119 deaths.

Outside of these two major cities, the highest number of deaths in the last 24 hours in Russia were recorded in the Nizhny Novgorod region (27), Buryatia (21), the Irkutsk region (21) and the Krasnodar region (18), as quoted from TASS.

The Delta variant is suspected of causing a spike in cases of COVID-19 infection in Russia. These conditions prompted authorities to reimpose measures to curb the spread of the virus.

In Moscow, the Euro 2020 Fan Zone was closed and local authorities also ordered all food courts in shopping centers to be closed.

Several regions, including Moscow, have also introduced mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for a number of sectors to increase the low uptake of the vaccine.

According to Our World in Data, only 15 percent of Russia's 146 million population have received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to 49.8 percent in the European Union, 53.6 percent in the United States and 65.5 percent in the United Kingdom.

To note, the total number of Red Bear Countries recorded 5,493,557 cases of COVID-19 infection, along with the addition of 20,616 infection cases in the last 24 hours based on Worldometers data. Meanwhile, the total number of deaths reached 134,545 with the total recovered patients reaching 4,984,037 people.