Russia lockdown again???

 Things are not that bad in russia russia has one of the largest populations in the european region and is contributing therefore a very large increase in um very large proportion of the overall cases in europe they have seen a significant increase in incidence over the past weeks and that's gone alongside an increase in deaths but taken in the context of the region and in terms of rates of infection they're not seeing what other countries in the european region particularly in central europe and eastern europe are currently seen at the moment russia has not requested international assistance and romania has been very clear that it does require international assistance given the current situation the level of incidence in romania is much higher and the country has seen very significant pressure on their health system with their hospitals very significantly burdened with cases at the moment so a lot of our support is going directly in to really take care of that immediate issue and uh and help support the country in responding to that immediate increase in in seriousness of the pandemic there russia is also seeing um pressure on health facilities in some parts of the country but it's not seeing or reporting to us yet the need um for international support and not not pressure seen at the national level so it's very clear that in countries that have lower vaccine uptake that's where we're seeing the serious pandemic effects at the moment in terms of deaths and people ending up in hospital um so at the general population level i believe that russia sits around 30 with a complete immunization series um that's similar to what we're seeing in other countries like romania and bulgaria have also got low vaccination uptake at the general level i think a little lower than 30 percent um and these are all rates that have recently um come to a plateau and so they're not increasing week by week and of course that's particularly concerning and and that's where we really need to come back to the forgotten child of the pandemic response which is the public health measures the contact tracing the testing the isolation and and i think we we tend to get so focused on the vaccine uptake that um that we do forget that in these current contexts regardless of the reasons for low vaccine uptake we still need to put a lot of attention on those other components of the response