Russia Still Has A COVID-19 Problem; 22,000 Cases In Two Days, 71 Dead

Russia reported a record 1,036 Covid-19 deaths in a single day Thursday, but officials have warned the worst is yet to come

About 22,253 COVID-19 cases and 71 virus-related deaths were recorded in Russia over the weekend, according to authorities.

Russia saw 10,268 COVID-19 cases and 34 deaths Sunday, the country's anti-coronavirus crisis center announced Monday, according to a report by Russian state-owned news agency Tass.

There were 11,985 cases and 37 deaths Saturday, the center said.

In total, Russia has recorded 22,433,361 coronavirus cases, while the country's death toll reached 396,620, the anti-coronavirus crisis center told reporters.

Russia had posted 21,779,606 COVID-19 recoveries as of Sunday after another 9,476 were added that day.

As a result of being preoccupied with its invasion of Ukraine, Russia skipped one COVID-19 wave and ignored another, a study published in November 2022 by The BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical journal, found.

Russia registered its first case of XBB.1.5, a subvariant of COVID-19's Omicron strain, in the country's western Penza region in January.

This subvariant is more efficient and contagious than its predecessors and has even been labeled by the World Health Organization as "the most transmissible" COVID-19 strain so far, according to the clinical practice of the Yale School of Medicine.

Scientists also nicknamed XBB.1.5 Kraken after they noticed its rapid spread. The Kraken is a mythical sea monster in Scandinavian lore that resembled a giant squid or octopus.

"Even people who have protection from vaccination or a recent case of COVID-19 have been infected," Dr. Scott Roberts, an infectious diseases specialist with Yale Medicine, said.

Estimates provided by the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this month showed that XBB.1.5 has been causing nearly 90% of new coronavirus cases in the country.

Despite the rate of Kraken's spread in the U.S., Dr. Kamil Khafizov, the head of genome research at Russia's Central Research Institute of Epidemiology, claimed that the subvariant would not dominate his country.

"The spread of XBB forms in the US starts from the Kraken and it managed to spread very quickly. It does not have such opportunities in the Russian Federation," he said, according to another report by Tass.

Even though Kraken appeared to spread faster than previous coronavirus strains, there has been no evidence to suggest that the subvariant causes more severe disease compared to other Omicron strains, per Yale Medicine.

While it will take time to gather the long-term data to show how well vaccines work against XBB.1.5, Roberts noted that those who got either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna bivalent booster are likely to have some decent protection, especially against severe disease and death.

"We are urging people to get the bivalent booster if they haven't already," he said.

There have been a total of 103,672,529 COVID-19 cases and 1,119,762 virus-related deaths in the U.S., data provided by the CDC showed.