As deaths rise, Russian doctors despair at low vaccine rate

Dr. Georgy Arbolishvili doesn’t need to see government statistics or hear about the records being broken every day for infections and deaths to know that Russia is struggling through a particularly alarming phase of the coronavirus pandemic.

He simply looks around his filled-tocapacity intensive care unit at Moscow’s Hospital No. 52.

With only about a third of Russia’s 146 million people vaccinated against COVID-19, the country has hovered near 1,000 reported deaths per day for weeks and surpassed it on Saturday - a situation that Arbolishvili says “causes despair.”

“The majority of ICU patients in grave condition are unvaccinated,” he told The Associated Press. These illnesses “could have been very easily avoided if a person had been vaccinated.”