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More than 5 percent of Russia's population, roughly 8 million people, has been infected with the coronavirus as its daily infection rate hits an all-time high, the Associated Press reported.
The country's coronavirus task force said it reached 34,325 new infections over the past 24 hours, bringing total recorded infections since the beginning of the pandemic to 8,027,012. Nearly 1,000 Russians died from COVID-19 over the same period, bringing the total to 224,310.
That's slightly less than the record 1,002 on Saturday, but the virus and low vaccination rates continue to crush the nation. Officials have attempted to lure Russians to vaccine clinics with lotteries and other incentives, but widespread misinformation and conflicting messages from authorities have set those efforts back.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
The task force said Monday that about 45 million Russians, or 32 percent of the country's nearly 146 million people, are fully vaccinated.
Despite the mounting toll, the Kremlin has ruled out a new nationwide lockdown like the one early on in the pandemic that badly hurt the economy, eroding President Vladimir Putin's popularity. Instead, it has delegated the power to enforce coronavirus restrictions to regional authorities.
Some of Russia's 85 regions have restricted attendance at large public events and limited access to theaters, restaurants and other venues. However, daily life is going on largely as normal in Moscow, St. Petersburg and many other Russian cities.
The highest concentrations of cases are mostly in comparatively urbanized western Russia and in the developed areas along the Pacific Coast such as Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, but the sparsely populated Siberian region of Sakha and Chukotka in the extreme northeast also show high case rates of more than 150 infections per 100,000 people over a seven-day period.
Russia's coronavirus death toll is Europe's largest. The official record ranks Russia as having the fifth-most pandemic deaths in the world following the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico.
However, state statistics agency Rosstat, which also counts deaths in which the virus wasn't considered the main cause, has reported a much higher pandemic death toll—about 418,000 people with COVID-19 as of August. Based on that number, Russia would rank as the fourth hardest-hit nation in the world, ahead of Mexico.
