Russia registers 17,862 new cases of Covid-19, 45 deaths in past 24 hours - HQ

MOSCOW. Aug 8 (Interfax) - Russia has registered 17,862 new cases of Covid-19, or nearly 2,500 fewer than the day before, in addition to 1,252 hospitalizations and 45 deaths in the past 24 hours, the coronavirus response headquarters said in a statement on Monday.

"As of August 8, Russia recorded 17,862 new cases of Covid-19 and 1,252 patients were hospitalized, down 16.8% from the previous day," the headquarters said.

The number of hospitalizations has grown in 25 Russian constituent territories, has decreased in 47, and has remained unchanged in 13, it said.

Forty-five patients died from Covid-19 over the day, as against 44 the day before.

The daily morbidity has decreased by 2,441 cases from 20,303 infections reported on Sunday, as the highest number since the end of March 2022. The morbidity had been growing for five consecutive days until today.

"Another 8,721 patients have recovered over the day, down 0.1% from August 7," the headquarters said.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Russia has seen a total of 18,730,561 cases of Covid-19, including 382,786 deaths and 18,048,076 recoveries.

Anna Popova, head of the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing (Rospotrebnadzor), said earlier that the Covid-19 morbidity was rising in Russia amid the emergence of new, more contagious coronavirus sub-lineages. According to Rospotrebnadzor, the share of more contagious BA.4 and BA.5 sub-lineages of the Omicron variant has been growing in the overall number of Covid-19 cases in Russia. However, any substantial change in the number of severe cases and hospitalizations is unlikely, and there is no need for reinstating coronavirus-related restrictions at the federal level.