A nationwide paid holiday from Saturday till 7th November was imposed in Russia by President Vladimir Putin.

The imposition of a paid holiday in Russia from Saturday to 7th November by order of Russian President Vladimir Putin to overcome and break the chain of recorded new covid cases is being followed strictly. An alarming 40,251 new covid cases have been recorded, which is a huge figure of infected cases since the beginning of the pandemic. These restrictions have been imposed by the authorities who are trying their level best to curb soaring infections and deaths, which are turning Russia into Europe’s worst-hit country during this Covid pandemic.

Rather than imposing nationwide measures from the beginning of the pandemic, Russia has placed its hope on producing several homegrown vaccine-like Sputnik V. As per the government’s statistics released on Saturday a 32.5 per cent of the population has been vaccinated even though the vaccine has been freely available for months.

Epidemiologists are worried about a piece of news cited by agencies that at least one-third of Russian’s will travel during the imposed holiday. On the other hand, stringent restrictions have been imposed in Moscow, which is believed to be the epicentre of Russia’s pandemic outbreak starting with the shutting down of non-essential services.

A statistics agency called Rosstat on Friday stated that the Russian authorities are not rolling out the true number of fatalities during the pandemic. According to the agency, the covid deaths are double as compared with the government tally. Hence totalling the toll of Covid-19 deaths in Russia to 450,000, which is the highest in Europe till date as stated by Agency Officials.