Pedestrians some wearing face masks walk in front of Christmas decorations at a shopping mall in Moscow on December 29, 2020, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus. Russia confirmed 27,002 new daily Covid-19 cases including 5,641 in
Moscow - Moscow health officials on Tuesday reported a 27-percent increase in deaths from the coronavirus in November compared to October, while still holding out against reimposing a full lockdown.
Figures published by Moscow's health department showed 4,542 fatalities from the virus in November compared to 3,573 in October and 1,569 in September.
Moscow health officials also said the capital saw 14,456 total deaths in November, meaning deaths from Covid-19 represented about a third of the total that month.
Russia has been battered by a second wave of infections since the fall, with epicentres in its capital Moscow and second-largest city Saint Petersburg.
But unlike most major European cities, the Russian capital has not reintroduced the kind of strict lockdown it imposed this spring at the start of the pandemic in the hopes of buttressing a struggling economy.
Officials have reduced in-office workers by a third, enforced mask-wearing in public places and obliged bars and restaurants to close by 11:00 pm.
On Tuesday Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called the city's surging outbreak "alarming".
He said that around 130,000 people were in hospital with Covid-19 in the city of some 12 million.
And he announced that the winter holiday period for schools had been extended by a week until January 17 to limit the spread of the virus.
Moscow's authorities, like the rest of the country, are betting on mass vaccination programme using Russia's homemade jab Sputnik V to get the outbreak under control.
On Tuesday Sobyanin widened the city's programme, which had started in early December with vulnerable workers, to include university students aged 18 and over.
The new Moscow death totals came a day after Russia admitted its fatalities were actually more than three times higher than it had previously reported.
The Rosstat statistics agency said that deaths from all causes recorded between January and February had risen by 229,700, with Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova adding that more than 81 percent of those deaths are attributable to the virus.
Those figures mean more than 186,000 Russians have died from Covid-19, placing the country's fatality total at third-highest worldwide after the United States and Brazil, according to an AFP count.
