Record COVID-19 deaths hit Russia, Eastern Europe as region spurns vaccines

Lockdowns, record COVID-19 deaths hit Russia, Eastern Europe as region spurns vaccines Russia will shut workplaces for a week, Latvia went back into lockdown for a month and Romanian funeral homes are running out of coffins, as vaccine-sceptic countries across ex-communist Eastern Europe face record-setting disease and deaths. Octav Ganea,Alexander Marrow Reuters

PLOIESTI, Romania/MOSCOW, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Russia will shut workplaces for a week, Latvia went back into lockdown for a month and Romanian funeral homes are running out of coffins, as vaccine-sceptic countries across ex-communist Eastern Europe face record-setting disease and deaths. ...

Public hostility to vaccination has hit other Eastern European countries that were within Moscow's orbit during the Cold War. The EU states with the lowest vaccination rates are all part of the former communist eastern bloc, including Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Poland, Latvia and Estonia. ...

Romania, where one person is dying of COVID-19 every five minutes, had the world's highest death rate per capita this week, with Bulgaria close behind. Only 36% of Romanian adults are vaccinated, compared with 74% across the EU as a whole. ...