Ambulance attendant Roman Stebakov has come face-to-face with COVID-19 many times - but he'd rather take his chances with the disease than get himself injected with Russia's Sputnik V vaccine.
"I won't get vaccinated until, I don't know, they break me and vaccinate me by force. I don't see the point in it, there are no guarantees it's safe," says the paramedic from Oryol, 300 km south of Moscow.
In conversations with Reuters, doctors and officials reeled off a host of factors that have fed the spread of the disease and forced Russia to revert to its tightest restrictions since the early months of the pandemic. The hospital is short of anaesthesists and infectious disease specialists. Most COVID patients need oxygen support and the supply is tight.
As of last week, nearly 38% of people in Oryol had been injected with their first dose, compared with 39.4% nationally. A source who previously worked in the COVID operations centre of one of Russia's regions said the country had locked down early at the start of the pandemic but then blundered by declaring victory too soon and going ahead with a national referendum in June 2020 on constitutional changes to allow President Vladimir Putin to run for potentially two more terms in office.
Her husband Aleksei Timoshenko, a doctor at the COVID hospital, said the picture he sees at work was 6-7 times worse than implied by official figures. "And now people are afraid, they really see that many are getting sick and many are dying,” he said.
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