STOCKHOLM, October 15. /TASS/. Experts of the World Health Organization (WHO) have noted the swift and timely measures taken by the Russian government to curb the spread of COVID-19, a disease caused by the novel coronavirus, Catherine Smallwood, a senior emergencies officer of the WHO Regional Office for Europe, said during a briefing transmitted on Facebook on Thursday.
Smallwood noted that since early October, there has been a rise in cases in Moscow and St. Petersburg, however, special measures have been taken to curb the spread of the virus.
"We've seen measures being taken in those settings. We've seen designation of more hospital beds for COVID. We've seen preparations made at the health facility level. And we've also seen new measures being implemented in terms of asking people to work from home, taking advantage of school holidays to ask people to take individual measures and then more restrictions on the occurrence of gatherings in public places," she said.
"So we have seen impact on the health system, we've seen responses from the local authorities and we expect to see an impact on the epidemic due to that," the WHO official said.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, about 38.5 mln people have been infected and over 1.09 mln have died. Russia has documented 1,354,163 cases of infection, while 1,048,097 people have recovered and 23,491 have died.