Moscow employers will be required to transfer up to one-third of their workforces to remote work starting next week due to the city’s “very dangerous” coronavirus situation, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced Thursday.
Sobyanin’s order for companies to send at least 30% of staff to work from home between Oct. 5-28 comes as the Russian capital’s daily count of new Covid-19 infections has more than doubled over the past week, surpassing 2,400 on Thursday.
Workers over the age of 65 and those suffering from chronic diseases will also be required to work remotely during this period.
“I hope this will be enough to bring down the incidence rate of the disease and we won’t have to make more difficult decisions,” he warned.
Sobyanin did not indicate whether he plans to enforce the rules through fines or other measures.
Workers at medical institutions, defense agencies, the state nuclear agency Rosatom and state space agency Roscosmos are exempt from the new rules.
Late last week, Sobyanin had urged businesses to reinstate work-from-home measures and “strongly recommended” Muscovites aged 65 and older to self-isolate.
“There was hope that this would significantly reduce trips by metro and land transport,” he wrote on his website Thursday. “Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough.”
Moscow’s schools will also take a two-week vacation from Oct. 5-18 in order to slow the city’s rise in coronavirus cases, Sobyanin announced earlier this week, saying that a large number of asymptomatic cases are among children.
Russia has officially confirmed 1.18 million coronavirus infections, the world’s fourth-highest number, with new daily cases growing rapidly from less than 5,000 to nearly 9,000 in a month.
Moscow has been the most-affected Russian city with almost 300,000 total infections and, according to Sobyanin, more than 5,000 hospitalizations per week and more than 1,500 severe cases.
Russian Scientist Accused of Passing Tech Secrets to China
A Russian scientist has been arrested in southern Siberia on suspicion of passing tech secrets to China, the MBKh Media news website reported Thursday.
Federal Security Service (FSB) officers from Moscow reportedly searched the apartment of Alexander Lukanin, 64, in the city of Tomsk 3,500 kilometers east of the Russian capital. Lukanin is currently in pre-trial detention, his friend Nikolai Krivopalov told MBKh Media.
“As far as we understand, Lukanin is accused of something like treason, that he transferred some technologies to the Chinese,” he said.
Lukanin had moved to China after his retirement and worked on high-voltage power supplies, fracture mechanics and other forms of engineering at Shenyang University, Krivopalov said.
According to the Tomskpolit Telegram channel, Lukanin returned to Russia over the New Year holidays and, after being unable to travel back to China due to the coronavirus pandemic, took up a job at Tomsk State University.
“As we understand it, there’s nothing in the charges against Lukanin that relates to defense,” Krivopalov told MBKh Media.
Lukanin is the latest elderly Russian academic to be accused or convicted of cooperating with foreign states in recent years. Critics have dismissed the charges as manifestations of the state’s paranoia.
