As deaths rise, Russian doctors despair at low vaccine rate

By KOSTYA MANENKOV and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
Associated Press

MOSCOW (AP) — Facing a surge of seriously ill COVID-19 patients, the head of an intensive care unit at a Moscow hospital says the situation could easily have been avoided if more Russians were vaccinated. With only about a third of Russia’s 146 million people fully vaccinated, the country has hovered near or over 1,000 reported deaths per day for weeks. Russia’s death toll is now 225,325 — by far the highest in Europe, even though most experts agree even that figure is an undercount. Dr. Georgy Arbolishvili, head of the ICU at Hospital No. 52, says those statistics are directly linked to the lack of vaccinations.