MOSCOW, October 1. /TASS/. Growing coronavirus incidence rates in Russia can be explained by better diagnostics techniques, Alexander Butenko, a department head at the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Russian Health Ministry, the developer of the Sputnik V vaccine, said on Friday.

"The hike in [coronavirus] cases can be explained by the extensive use of specific diagnostics methods," he said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel.

According to Butenko, experts anticipated upward tendencies in COVID-19 morbidity in the autumn period last year. "We anticipated it, and we were right that after lots of people returned from vacationing destinations to their homes and places of work, <…> after offline classes began at schools and universities, it increased contacts with people who had been infected in other regions, in particular in Moscow and other big cities," he recalled.

"As for the current year, the situation is recurring, with people spending their vacations in other localities and returning home. But, I think the current situation is somewhat different <…> because the prevailing virus genotype is different — it is now the Delta variant. But there are positive things: first, it can be noted that most of those hospitalized are non-vaccinated people, which speaks about the vaccine’s efficacy," he said, adding that the pandemic should not be divided into waves but rather be seen as a single epidemiological process with fluctuations.

To date, 7,535,548 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Russia, with 6,692,722 patients having recovered from the disease. Russia’s latest data indicates 208,142 fatalities nationwide. The Russian government set up an Internet hotline to keep the public updated on the coronavirus situation.