MOSCOW (Reuters) – St Petersburg is running dangerously low on hospital beds for COVID-19 patients, city authorities said, as deliveries of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine began on Wednesday across the country.
Biotech group Biocad, licenced to produce Sputnik V, said it was supplying the shot nationwide to help fulfil a large-scale inoculation plan.
In comments to local television late on Tuesday, deputy St. Petersburg governor Oleg Ergashev said just 4% of the beds allocated to patients infected with the coronavirus were vacant.
“We understand that additional capacities need to be deployed,” he said.
The Kremlin has resisted imposing a national lockdown, saying targeted measures to contain the coronavirus were enough, though it warned last week that St Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city and President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, was close to crossing a “red line”.
Russia has reported around 2.7 million COVID-19 infections and nearly 48,000 deaths.
More than 200,000 people in Russia have been vaccinated against the disease.
Data published this week found Sputnik V, which was approved by Russian regulators in August after less than two months of human testing, to be 91.4% effective.
Trials of the vaccine are ongoing in Belarus, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and India.
(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova, Tom Balmforth and Polina Nikolskaya; Writing by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Katya Golubkova and John Stonestreet)
