MOSCOW (REUTERS) – Moscow will reintroduce lockdown measures from Oct 28 to combat surging Covid-19 cases, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Thursday (Oct 21), with all shops, bars and restaurants due to close, except those selling essential goods, such as supermarkets and pharmacies.

President Vladimir Putin this week approved a government proposal for a week-long workplace shutdown at the start of November, after coronavirus-related deaths across Russia in the past 24 hours hit yet another daily record of 1,028 on Wednesday, with 34,073 new infections.

Russia reported a record daily high of both coronavirus-related deaths and new Covid-19 infections on Thursday.

Russia has also reported some Covid-19 infections with a new coronavirus variant believed to be even more contagious than the Delta one, the RIA news agency said on Thursday.

It is possible that the AY.4.2 variant will spread widely, RIA quoted the state consumer watchdog’s senior researcher Kamil Khafizov as saying.

That could cause the rate of new Covid-19 cases, already at record highs in Russia, to rise even further.

The new variant could even replace Delta eventually, although the process is likely to be slow, he said.

The sub-variant known as Delta Plus, designated as AY.4.2 in Britain, is growing and accounted for about 6 per cent of all sequences generated in the UK, the UK Health Security Agency said last week, but it has not been labelled as “under investigation” or a “variant of concern”.

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