‘All current solutions are bad solutions’

Mayor Sergey Sobyanin on how Moscow is handling the pandemic’s second wave

To mark his tenth year as Moscow mayor, Sergey Sobyanin gave a lengthy interview to the Russian state news agency “TASS.” But rather than focusing on the last decade of his career, he mostly talked about the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s what he said, in a nutshell.

A systematic discrediting campaign was launched around the coronavirus vaccine — this was commissioned by our competitors. Mass vaccination will be the ultimate victory over the pandemic. An optimal model for combating the coronavirus has been created in Moscow. In China — it’s street closures and city lockouts. In Sweden, it’s who died, died and who lived, lived, let’s move on. We’re somewhere in the middle. In Moscow, we’ve firmly reached 4,500 new COVID-19 cases per day and 1,200 hospitalizations per day. On October 19, we will begin filling the two remaining reserve hospitals out of four. We’ll definitely withstand the situation in the coming weeks — the main thing is for it to stabilize. To survive this peak, we need to put sectors that aren’t related to manufacturing on pause, for example, the education system, which has a million school children and 170,000 workers. I hope that the measures taken will stop the growth, because a second such blow will be very difficult for small businesses to survive. All current solutions are bad solutions, but we aren’t choosing between good and bad, we’re choosing less bad. If nothing is done, there will be more unpleasant measures. Today, it’s important that none of the companies face fines, but rather fulfill the requirements. In the case of total non-compliance with the rules, we will shut down business and this will be much worse. In April–May, companies lost a lot, but they are recovering very quickly. I’m sure that within a few months we’ll wrap up this story with the pandemic and then business will grow. And we will help.

The full interview with Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin is available on the TASS website.

Summary by Alexander Baklanov

Cover photo: Mikhail Dzhaparidze / TASS / Scanpix / LETA