WORLD
Moscow declares COVID-related restrictions, distance work requirements till spring
Baku, October 20, AZERTAC
Moscow’s authorities have made a decision to tighten COVID pandemic-related restrictions again, according to TASS.
Starting from October 25 elderly people will be obliged to abide by certain lockdown requirements and employers to transfer to distance work at least 30% of their personnel who have neither been vaccinated nor had the illness, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said.
The restrictions have had to be imposed because the number of newly-identified infections in the city has grown four-fold, while it has tripled in terms of patients taken to hospital, and doubled for the number of patients in serious and very serious conditions. Sobyanin also complained that the vaccination rate among elderly people was unduly low: only one in three have agreed to be vaccinated, while most of the five million vaccinated Muscovites are middle-aged.
All employers are obliged to send at least 30% of their staff to work from home starting from October 25 and till February 25, 2022. The same applies to staffers over 60 years of age and having certain chronic diseases if their presence at the workplace is not critically important for the organization’s normal operation. The employers will be obliged to present weekly online reports.
This requirement does not concern the vaccinated and those who have had the disease already, medics and employees of strategically important branches of the economy, including the nuclear power corporation Rosatom, space corporation Roscosmos and arms industries. Previously, the mandatory distance work requirement was applied to 30% of employees in Moscow. It lasted for two months, from June 12 to August 13. Then its status was eased to a recommendation.